T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

I N T E R NAT IONA L
P OL I T IC A L
T H E ORY
 THE
OXFOR D
H A NDBOOK S
OF
INTERNATIONAL
REL ATIONS

General Editors:
Christian Reus-​Smit of the University of Queensland and
Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford

The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a multi-​volume set of reference

books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-​fields
of International Relations.
The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-​Smit and
Duncan Snidal, with each volume edited by a distinguished pair of specialists in their
respective fields.
The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship
and reshapes it, pushing each sub-​field in challenging new directions. Following the
example of the original Reus-​Smit and Snidal Oxford Handbook of International
Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by a pair of schol-
ars drawn from alternative perspectives, reading its sub-​field in an entirely new way,
and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.
 The Oxford Handbook of

INTERNATIONAL
POLITICAL
THEORY
Edited by
CHRIS BROWN
and
ROBYN ECKERSLEY

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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 Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our series editors, Chris Reus-​Smit and Duncan Snidal, for entrust-
ing us with the task of putting together this Handbook, and for providing enthusias-
tic encouragement and feedback on our chosen theme of International Political Theory
in the Real World. We also wish to thank Hamza Bin Jehangir for his invaluable and
cheerful assistance in preparing the manuscript for submission. Thanks also to Dominic
Byatt, Olivia Wells, and their colleagues at Oxford University Press, especially Sarah
Barrett, the best copy-​editor either of us has worked with. We have learned the hard way
that rounding up 50 stellar contributors, coaxing them with our brief, providing our edi-
torial feedback, and ensuring that they all deliver is not a task for the faint-​hearted. We
are delighted that our contributors have all risen to the occasion, and we wholeheartedly
thank them for their excellent efforts and the innumerable ways in which they have each
enriched the field of International Political Theory.
Chris Brown
Robyn Eckersley
 Contents

List of Contributors xiii

PA RT I I N T RODU C T ION
1. International Political Theory and the Real World 3
Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

PA RT I I H I STORY, T R A DI T ION S ,
A N D P E R SP E C T I V E S
2. History of International Thought: Text and Context 21
David Boucher
3. The Slow Normalization of Normative Political
Theory: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism Then and Now 35
Peter Sutch
4. International Relations and International Political Theory 48
Chris Brown
5. International Law and International Political Theory 60
Gerry Simpson
6. Critical International Political Theory 74
Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib
7. Feminist International Political Theory 87
Laura Sjoberg

PA RT I I I I N T E R NAT IONA L J U S T IC E
8. Global Distributive Justice: Seven Theses about Facts
and Empirical Research 103
Simon Caney
viii   Contents

9. Real-​World Global Egalitarianism 118

Darrel Moellendorf
10. Moral Responsibility—​and Luck?—​in International Politics 130
Toni Erskine
11. International Law and International Justice 143
Hilary Charlesworth
12. Transitional Justice 153
Susanne Buckley-​Zistel
13. Minority Rights 166
Will Kymlicka
14. Environmental Justice and Sustainability 179
Edward Page

PA RT I V I N T E R NAT IONA L P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY

OF V IOL E N C E A N D C ON F L IC T
15. Violence and International Political Theory 195
Anthony F. Lang, Jr
16. The Historical Just War Tradition 209
Cian O’Driscoll
17. Just War Theory in Times of Individual Rights 221
Janina Dill
18. Moral Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflict 233
Michael L. Gross
19. Ethics, Drones, and Killer Robots 247
Christopher Coker
20. International Relations Theory and Cyber Security: Threats,
Conflicts, and Ethics in an Emergent Domain 259
Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness
21. The Ethics and “Realism” of Nonviolent Action 273
Mary Elizabeth King
 Contents   ix

PA RT V H UM A N I TA R IA N I SM
A N D H UM A N R IG H T S
22. Humanitarianism and Human Rights 289
Michael N. Barnett
23. Human Rights in the Real World 304
Stephen Hopgood
24. Humanitarian Actors and International Political Theory 316
Jennifer M. Welsh
25. The “Responsibility to Protect” and International Political Theory 330
James Pattison
26. Multiculturalism and Women’s Rights 343
Denise Walsh
27. The Human Right to Health and the Challenge of Poverty 357
Patrick Hayden
28. International Political Theory and LGBTQ Rights 370
Anthony J. Langlois

PA RT V I DE M O C R AC Y, AC C OU N TA B I L I T Y,
A N D G L OBA L G OV E R NA N C E
29. Democracy and Global Governance 385
Carol C. Gould
30. Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Political Legitimacy 400
Terry Macdonald
31. The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy 414
Eva Erman
32. The Contested Ethics of Democracy Promotion 427
Milja Kurki
33. Deliberation and Global Governance 440
Jens Steffek
x   Contents

34. Accountability in Global Economic Governance 453

Kate Macdonald
35. Global Governance in the “Anthropocene” 467
Frank Biermann

PA RT V I I E T H IC S A N D I N T E R NAT IONA L
P U B L IC P OL IC Y
36. International Political Theory Meets International Public Policy 481
Christian Barry
37. Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World 495
Tim Dunne
38. Fair Trade Under Fire: How to Think about Fair Trade
in Theory and Practice 508
Nicole Hassoun
39. International Migration and Human Rights 520
Luara Ferracioli
40. Climate Equity in the Real World 533
Steve Vanderheiden
41. The Ethical Foundations of Aid: Two Duties of Rescue 546
Paul Collier
42. A Feminist Practical Ethics of Care 559
Fiona Robinson

PA RT V I I I N E W DI R E C T ION S I N
I N T E R NAT IONA L P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY
43. Judgement: A Conceptual Sketch 575
Friedrich Kratochwil
44. Virtues and Capabilities 587
Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould
45. Emotions and International Political Theory 600
Renée Jeffery
 Contents   xi

46. The Ethics of Recognition in International Political Theory 612

Anna Geis
47. Republicanism and International Political Theory 626
Steven Slaughter

PA RT I X F OR A N D AG A I N S T R E A L P OL I T IC S
A N D I N T E R NAT IONA L P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY
48. Realist Challenges 641
Duncan Bell
49. The Marxist Critique of International Political Theory 652
Andrew Davenport
50. The Case for Ideal Theory 664
Laura Valentini

Index 677
 List of Contributors

Michael N. Barnett is Professor of International Relations and Political Science in the

Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University.
Christian Barry is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Moral, Social
and Political Theory in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences at
the Australian National University.
Duncan Bell is a Reader in Political Thought and International Relations in the
Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy in
the Department of Political Science at Yale University.
Frank Biermann is Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at the Copernicus
Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University.
David Boucher is Professor of Political Philosophy and International Relations in the
Department of Politics and International Relations, Cardiff University, Wales, and
Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Johannesburg.
Chris Brown is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the Department of
International Relations at the London School of Economics.
Susanne Buckley-​Zistel is Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies at the Center for
Conflict Studies, Philipps University Marburg.
Simon Caney is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and
International Studies, University of Warwick.
Hilary Charlesworth is a Laureate Professor in the Melbourne Law School, University
of Melbourne, and Professor of International Law at the Australian National University.
Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations in the Department of
International Relations at the London School of Economics.
Paul Collier is the Co-​Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and
Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the
University of Oxford.
Andrew Davenport is Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of
International Politics at Aberystwyth University.
xiv   list of Contributors

Janina Dill is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International

Relations at the University of Oxford.
Tim Dunne is Professor of International Relations and Executive Dean of the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland.
Robyn Eckersley is Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Political
Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Eva Erman is a Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at
Stockholm University.
Toni Erskine is Professor of International Politics and Director of Research in the
School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.
Luara Ferracioli is Lecturer in Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at the
University of Sydney.
Anna Geis is Professor of International Security and Conflict Studies in the Institute of
International Politics at Helmut-​Schmidt-​Universität/University of the Federal Armed
Forces, Hamburg.
Carol C. Gould is Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department at Hunter
College at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Harry D. Gould is Associate Professor and Director of IR Graduate Programs in the
Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University.
Michael L. Gross is Professor and Head of School in the School of Political Science at the
University of Haifa.
Nicole Hassoun is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy
at Binghamton University.
Patrick Hayden is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations in the
School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews.
Stephen Hopgood is Professor of International Relations at SOAS, University of
London.
Renée Jeffery is Professor of International Relations in the School of Government and
International Relations at Griffith University.
Anna Jurkevics is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of British Columbia.
Mary Elizabeth King is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the United Nations-
affiliated University for Peace and Distinguished Rothermere American Institute Fellow
at the University of Oxford.
Friedrich Kratochwil is Professor of International Relations at the Central European
University, Budapest.
 list of Contributors    xv

Milja Kurki is Professor in International Relations Theory in the Department of

International Politics at Aberystwyth University.
Will Kymlicka is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the
Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University Canada.
Anthony F. Lang, Jr is Professor of International Political Theory in the School of
International Relations, University of St Andrews.
Anthony J. Langlois is Associate Professor and Head of the Discipline of International
Relations in the School of International Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide.
Kate Macdonald is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the School of Social and
Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Terry Macdonald is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the School of Social and
Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Ryan C. Maness is Assistant Professor, Defense Analysis Department, Naval
Postgraduate School.
Darrel Moellendorf is Professor in International Political Theory at the Cluster
Normative Orders at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main.
Cian O’Driscoll is a Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Social and Political
Sciences at the University of Glasgow.
Edward Page is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics
and International Studies at the University of Warwick.
James Pattison is Professor of Politics in the School of Social Sciences at the University
of Manchester.
Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science
at Carleton University, Ottawa.
Gerry Simpson is Professor of Public International Law in the Law Department at the
London School of Economics.
Laura Sjoberg is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political
Science, University of Florida.
Steven Slaughter is Associate Professor in International Relations in the Faculty of Arts
and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne.
Jens Steffek is a Professor of Transnational Governance and Head of the Department of
History and Social Sciences, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.
Peter Sutch is Professor of Political and International Theory in the Department
of Politics and International Relations, Cardiff School of Law and Politics, Cardiff
University.
xvi   list of Contributors

Steven Torrente is Affiliate Instructor in Political Science at the Metropolitan State

University of Denver.
Laura Valentini is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of
Government at the London School of Economics.
Brandon Valeriano is Donald Bren Chair of Armed Conflict, Marine Corps University.
Steve Vanderheiden is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Colorado Boulder.
Denise Walsh is Associate Professor in the Departments of Politics and Women, Gender
& Sexuality at the University of Virginia.
Jennifer M. Welsh is Professor of International Relations at the European University
Institute in Florence.
 Pa rt I

I N T RODU C T ION
 ­c hapter 1

In ternational P ol i t i c a l
Theory an d t h e
Real Worl d

Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

In this introduction we set out the underlying rationale of the Handbook, introduce
and contextualize the two core questions we posed to our contributors, and explain why
we believe them to be important and timely. We reflect on the meaning and scope of
International Political Theory (IPT), the nature of normative theorizing, and the chal-
lenges raised by our emphasis on “real politics.” Finally, the chapter provides an over-
view of the volume, setting out the way in which we have broken down the subject
matter of IPT.
IPT focuses on the point where two fields of study meet—​International Relations
and Political Theory. It takes from the former a central concern with the “inter-
national” broadly defined; from the latter it takes a broadly normative identity. IPT stud-
ies the “ought” questions that have been ignored or sidelined by the modern study of
International Relations, and the “international” dimension that Political Theory has in
the past neglected. A central proposition of IPT is that the “domestic” and the “inter-
national” cannot be treated as self-​contained spheres, although this does not preclude
states and the states system from being regarded by some practitioners of IPT as central
points of reference.
International Political Theory has a history which is as extensive as that of both
Political Theory and International Relations, and certainly predates the so-​called
“Westphalian” System (Brown, Nardin, and Rengger 2002). Still, the last three decades
have been an active period for scholarship in this field. It has seen the revival of “Just
War” thinking, the emergence of post-​Rawlsian global justice theory, new thinking
about democracy and accountability beyond the nation-​state, the further development
of English School theorizing, and a new interest in issues of intervention, non-​interven-
tion, and sovereignty. Perhaps most important of all has been the collapse of the notion
of a self-​contained discipline of International Relations as a result of the challenges of
4    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

constructivism, critical theory, feminist and gender theory, green political theory, and
post-​structuralism in all its forms. Not all of these changes have directly supported the
field of IPT—​post-​structuralist thinking, for example, is often hostile to normative the-
orizing—​but all have contributed to an intellectual atmosphere that has been conducive
to a sustained assault on normative questions; and such an assault has taken place, with
a burgeoning of literature in the field, the establishment of new journals, and the ubi-
quitous presence of IPT in university programmes in both International Relations and
Political Theory.
In short, IPT has been mainstreamed, and whereas as recently as the 1990s a
Handbook of International Political Theory might have been expected to proselytize for
the field, we are now in a position to take stock of what is a healthy enterprise, looking at
where we are today, where the discipline is heading, and, equally important, where the
development that has taken place has neglected certain issues. This agenda mandates an
engagement with “real politics,” and this engagement provides the overarching theme
for the Handbook. Our aim is to provide an authoritative account of the field, guided
by focusing on two basic questions concerning its purposes and methods of inquiry.
First, how does IPT connect with real-​world politics? In particular, how does it engage
with real-​world problems, and position itself in relation to the practices of real-​world
politics? And second, following on from this, what is the relationship between IPT and
empirical research in international relations?
These two questions are closely related, but nonetheless distinct. The first question
invites renewed reflection on the vocation and basic purpose of IPT. We do not doubt
that it is important to preserve our understanding of past theories, and to track shifts in
our theoretical understandings over time; but if the central purpose of IPT is to engage
with normative questions, then these tasks cannot be allowed to dominate the field—​
and, in any event, there are good reasons to doubt whether past theories are adequate
to the task of grappling with complex contemporary problems. If IPT is concerned not
only with reflecting on, and refining, existing ideas, norms, and practices in real-​world
politics but also with challenging and transforming them according to desired ideals
and goals, then it is important and necessary to understand how IPT is positioned vis-​
à-​vis the real world. In our first question therefore, we invite consideration of the his-
tory, potential, and limits of IPT in influencing international debates in general, and
international public policy in particular. This entails an examination of the relationship
between ontology and ethics, and a clarification and justification of the role of ideal vs
non-​ideal theory, and practical vs applied theory. This question also provides an oppor-
tunity for International Political Theorists to revisit and confront the many different
faces of power, and to reflect on the relationship between morality, legitimacy, and
international law.
Our second question asks whether, to what extent, and how IPT should be informed
by empirical research. In the general field of political theory, a growing frustration with
what has been seen to be an overly abstract and idealist form of moral theorizing, too
introspective and narcissistic, has arisen; a similar charge could be levelled at much IPT,
hence our desire in this volume to focus on establishing a proper relationship between
 Introduction   5

theoretical endeavour and empirical investigation. It should be noted that we are not
suggesting that normative IPT theory must be led by empirical research (and the ques-
tions asked by empirical researchers)—​rather, we invite those engaged in normative IPT
to explain and justify to what extent, and how, their theorizing is informed by empirical
research in International Relations and other fields.
Our aim in this Handbook, therefore, is not simply to provide an authoritative survey
of the field as it stands, although that was, of course, part of the mandate we gave to our
authors. Rather, like the Oxford Handbook of International Relations, we aim to pro-
vide an intervention in the field by investigating the potential for a closer engagement
with real politics, and to that end we have asked our contributors to reflect on our guid-
ing questions in approaching their topics. But, of course, we have not demanded that
they all address both questions systematically, since not all topics in the volume can be
made to connect directly with real politics, or to touch upon them in the same way or to
the same degree. Nor have we set out to narrow or even bridge the divide between the
real and the ideal, or the normative and the empirical, since this is not always desirable
or indeed possible in some cases, as we explain below. Rather, our aim is to encourage
greater reflexivity about the various points at which IPT has, or should have, contact
with real politics and/​or empirical research, to explore how that contact has been nego-
tiated and whether it could be better negotiated, to draw out in greater relief the distinct-
ive virtues of IPT, and to showcase the diversity of IPT approaches.

Modes of Normative Inquiry

Before engaging further with the themes of our Handbook, it may be helpful to explore
the range of different approaches that fall under the rubric of IPT. While the field of IPT
is typically dissected along the lines of different traditions of political thought or differ-
ent topics, we stress that it can also, and perhaps more fruitfully, be approached in terms
of the different modes of normative inquiry, modes which can cut across traditions and
topics. Here we single out four analytically distinct but, as we will demonstrate, often
very closely related modes: interpretation; critique; evaluation and prescription; and
meta-​normative reflection.
Interpretation is a mode of normative inquiry that seeks to reveal and illuminate nor-
mative meaning. Interpretation is not unique to IPT, and it is undertaken in different
ways by different traditions of IPT. Its most specialized expression is the interpretation
of historical, canonical, and contemporary texts on international politics and inter-
national law. Interpretation entails exegesis, but it may also include comparison with
other texts to reveal and illuminate different normative and legal understandings in the
past and the present, and it may extend to locating texts in their historical or contempor-
ary contexts—​and here the term “text” should be understood as widely as possible, and
not restricted to written materials. Interpretation may, and frequently will, blend into
Critique but is, nonetheless, analytically distinct from that mode of inquiry.
6    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

Critique also seeks to reveal meaning, but in ways that expose and criticize rather than
simply illuminate and enrich understanding. This mode of inquiry can operate at many
different levels and, again, it is not unique to IPT. Nonetheless, critique is widely rec-
ognized as forming part of the core business of IPT when it takes the form of exposing
self-​serving, unjust, harmful, or wrongful ideas and practices in world politics, and in
particular political ideologies, traditions, texts, and discourses. For some IPT traditions,
critique is a necessary preliminary to Prescription, but it may also be the case that crit-
ical interpretation is seen as the central task of the critical theorist, with prescription
very much a secondary activity, albeit one that is at least implicit in any developed cri-
tique. Critique may be conducted from a vantage point that is external or internal to the
subject of critique; while external critique often takes a more radical form than internal
critique, this is not always the case.
Evaluation and prescription provides answers to normative questions such as what
is good or bad, how we should be and act in the world, and how we should order and
regulate relations between sovereign or corporate entities, communities, or individuals.
While critique is a form of evaluation that entails judging, here we understand evalu-
ation to include a more explicit set of normative standards by which to judge not only
what is bad, wrong, or unjust but also what is good, right, or fair, etc. Not all evaluation
of this kind necessarily entails prescription, understood as recommendations for action
or policy change. However, prescription presupposes a prior evaluation, which is why
we have paired them here. Like critique, evaluation and prescription are widely con-
sidered to be defining concerns of IPT, irrespective of whether they take the form of
defending rules of right conduct, or elaborating principles of institutional design, pro-
cedural justice, legal or policy reform, or approaches to making practical judgements.
In many IPT traditions, “morality” and “ethics,” and “moral” and “ethical,” are used
interchangeably, but in some traditions they have distinct meanings. For some, moral
principles are duties of proper conduct whereas ethical decisions are situated, practical
judgements about how to act, all things considered. Against both these approaches, pol-
itical theorists working in the realist tradition eschew a particular focus on the “ethical”
or the “moral” and focus on what is unique about “the political.” As will be apparent in
our discussion of “real politics” below, this realist tradition is not necessarily opposed to
the tasks of evaluation or prescription, though it is opposed to a moralism that assumes
away questions of order, conflict, and applicability in particular contexts.
Meta-​normative reflection covers inquiry into the foundations of morality and eth-
ics, and how we know when something is right, valid, good, or bad, and the sources of
normative legitimacy. This includes critical reflection on methods of normative inquiry,
including how norms are justified (for example, by reference to the virtues or to thought
experiments to draw out, appeal to, or test different moral intuitions), the processes of
practical judgement, and different types of moral, ethical, and legal reasoning. It also
includes comparison and debates on the strengths and weaknesses of different tradi-
tions of normative inquiry in world politics and international law, whether between
traditionalists and revisionists, cosmopolitans and communitarians, or deontologists,
consequentialists, and/​or virtue ethicists, to name only a few.
 Introduction   7

Given our focus on “real politics,” it may be helpful if we compare this way of concep-
tualizing the four different modes of inquiry with the much-cited distinction between
“critical theory” and “problem-​solving theory” set out in Robert Cox’s influential paper
“People, States and World Order: Beyond IR Theory” (Cox 1981). Cox begins with his
famous pronouncement that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose,”
although he qualifies this by saying that “sophisticated theory is never just the expres-
sion of a perspective” (p. 128). From this starting point he identifies two distinct kinds of
theory: on the one hand, theory can attempt to be “a guide to solve the problems posed
within the terms of the particular perspective which was the point of departure.” This
is problem-​solving theory, which “takes the world as it finds it with the prevailing social
and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given
framework for action” (p. 128). On the other hand, there is critical theory, which does not
take institutions and power relations for granted, but calls them into question, examin-
ing their origins and the interests they serve. The framework for action, taken for granted
by problem-​solving theory, is here appraised and subjected to critique. The ceteris pari-
bus assumptions and fixed limits which characterize problem-​solving theory are here
set aside—​critical theory is concerned with historical change and a world in which all
things are not considered equal or held in suspension for the purposes of analysis.
The distinction between problem-​solving and critical theory has been central to
the development of critical theory and indeed of IPT, but it is, arguably, much misun-
derstood. Partly Cox himself is responsible for this misunderstanding; although he
states clearly that both modes of theorizing have their uses, he leaves the impression
that problem-​solving theory is a distinctly second-​rate activity. The suggestion is that
problem-​solving theory is in some sense subsumed by critical theory; once the import-
ance of critical theory is understood, the biases of problem-​solving can be described as
conservative and revealed as ideology (Cox 1981: 129). But this is unsatisfactory, because
it implies that whereas problem-​solving is ideological and based on a particular per-
spective, critical theory is not—​which clearly goes against the proposition that “all the-
ory is for someone and for some purpose.” More accurately, both problem-​solving and
critical theory reflect a perspective—​indeed may represent different responses to the
same perspective, different moments in the life of a theory.
The legitimacy of problem-​solving theory is particularly important in the context of
this Handbook, in which the engagement of IPT with real politics is a central theme
and the proposition that there is something uncritical about attempting to solve prob-
lems must be resisted. In some respects, a distinction drawn by Stephen K. White in his
Political Theory and Postmodernism is more to the point (White 1991). Contrasting the
driving force—​moral, political, and aesthetic—​behind the work of the leading Frankfurt
School critical theorist of our day, Jürgen Habermas, with that which animates post-​
structuralists and post-​modernists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-​
François Lyotard, he distinguishes between “[a]‌sense of ‘responsibility to act’ and a
sense of ‘responsibility to otherness.’ Corresponding to this distinction is one relating to
language: its ‘action-​coordinating’ function and its ‘world-​disclosing’ function” (White
1991: x). Taking these terms out of their original context, world-​disclosing theory
8    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

is clearly an important part of contemporary IPT, central to both Interpretation and

Critique; but action-​coordinating, problem-​oriented theory, leading to Prescription, is
every bit as important, and provides the focus for much of the material we present here.
Of course, this type of theory necessarily entails judgements about what aspects of the
world should be bracketed, and what aspects should be called into question in order to
decide how best to respond to particular problems. Critical theorists should be able to
justify what and what not to bracket, and also to reveal and understand the implications
of these judgements.
Each of the modes of inquiry set out above can stand alone, but they are often com-
bined. Prescription—​ particularly when it involves the defence of action-​ guiding
norms—​is typically preceded by evaluation and critique, which prepares the ground for
reform by exposing problems, injustices, or harmful practices that prescription seeks
to rectify. Indeed, some critical traditions of IPT seek to combine all or most of these
modes while also crossing into the realm of positive/​explanatory theory. The important
point we want to make here is often missed by those who are too quick to condemn IPT
for its failure to engage with the real world—​namely, that not all these modes of inquiry
necessarily depend on, or need to have any direct engagement with, real politics or
empirical inquiry. For example, such an engagement is not necessary for the interpret-
ation of historical or contemporary texts, or for certain kinds of meta-​ethical reflection.
But when it comes to identifying real-​world problems and criticizing real-​world prac-
tices, then empirical research on such problems and practices does become relevant.
Likewise, when it comes to the development of action-​guiding prescriptions that seek
to change existing practices, then empirical research and feasibility constraints must be
taken on board, although exactly how they are taken on board remains to be seen.

Political Realism and IPT

Our concern with real politics requires us to explore the relationship between the real
and the ideal, and the often fraught relationship between realists and idealists.
One useful entry point into this relationship is offered by the sustained critique of
“normative political theory” mounted by the so-​called “new realists” in political theory
(e.g. Williams 2005; Geuss 2008; Runciman 2012; Rossie and Sleat 2014; Sleat 2016). By
“normative political theory” these critics have in mind what they see as an excessively
abstract style of liberal moral and political philosophy in the Anglo-​American trad-
ition, much of which focuses on justice and follows in the footsteps of Rawls, although
the argument is sometimes directed also at Habermasian critical theory. For the new
realists, this body of political theory (and its international and global extension) fails
to grasp the distinctiveness of “the political,” the conditions of possibility for the suc-
cess of normative prescriptions, the centrality of power in its many dimensions, and the
ineradicable nature of disagreement and conflict. This critique includes, but goes well
beyond, a critique of the political feasibility of such theories. Indeed, it is primarily a
 Introduction   9

methodological critique that takes issue with putting morality and ethics first in political
theory. This is done when political theorists begin with what are seen to be “pre-​pol-
itical” moral norms (such as justice or autonomy) or the ultimate desired ethical end-​
states (happiness), assign them a foundational role in ordering political life, and then
offer prescriptions that seek to realize or apply these norms. For the new realists, this is
starting in the wrong place. The central feature of the new political realism is an asser-
tion of the autonomy of the political; contra much modern analytical political theory,
politics is not a branch of applied ethics, and political theory should focus on real polit-
ical actors and institutions. That is, any political theory worth its name must start with
the real world of politics, where disagreement (including moral disagreement) is rife,
the need for stability and order is paramount, and coercion is therefore necessary. In a
key statement of the new realism, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” Bernard
Williams (2005) critiques two accounts of the relationship between politics and ethics.
First, he identifies the enactment model whereby principles, concepts, ideals, and val-
ues are formulated in theory, and politics is given the task of enacting what has been
formulated, using persuasion or exercising power; utilitarian thought often takes this
form. Then he outlines the structural model, in which theory lays down the conditions
under which power can be justly exercised; unlike the enactment model, this account
of morality doesn’t directly tell us what politics must achieve, but rather sets constraints
on what politics can rightly do—​the classic illustration here is Rawls’s A Theory of Justice
(1970). In both these models the moral is prior to the political—​Williams terms this
“political moralism” and contrasts it with “political realism,” which reverses priorities.
The first, unavoidable political question is that of securing order, and the “basic legit-
imation demand” is that order be secured in a way that is acceptable to all. The new
realists draw no sharp distinction between the domestic and the international spheres
of politics, since in both worlds morality and ethics can provide only a weak source of
political motivation, and therefore play at best only a minor role. Instead of engaging in
abstract theorizing, political theorists should focus on the struggle for the legitimation
of political power, and should recognize their own roles as agents in this struggle (Rossi
and Sleat 2014: 693). This necessarily requires a turn to the political sources of norma-
tivity, including the procedures by which political authority is acquired and collective
decisions made, and the contexts, contingencies, and constraints that shape real-​world
decisions.
The new realist critique is not to be conflated with non-​ideal normative political the-
ory, but it shares with non-​ideal theory a sensitivity to feasibility constraints, which
means that what is desired or prescribed must be something that can be brought about
by capable agents with the necessary motivation (Gilabert and Lawford-​Smith 2012).
Likewise, for realists, the most important question is not who is causally or morally
responsible for a harm or problem but rather who has the power and will to fix it. This
is not to suggest that realists do not have ethical concerns, do not wish to see pressing
global problems resolved, or do not wish to make normative interventions. It simply
means that if capable and motivated social agents are missing, then the problem will
remain unaddressed. To the extent that normative political theorists fail to address these
10    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

questions, they are engaging in no more than wishful thinking that represents an escape
from, rather than engagement with, politics.
To what extent does the new realism share attributes with the realism familiar to stu-
dents of IR theory? The simple answer is: more than many new realists are prepared
to admit. Figures such as Hans J. Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Reinhold Niebuhr
are quite close in spirit to figures such as Geuss and Williams. Part of the problem here
is to be found in the ambiguities associated with the term “realism” in the discourse of
International Relations; Morgenthau et al. were concerned to find the right place for
morality, but structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer are much
more inclined to reject normative concerns altogether. Duncan Bell in Chapter 48 goes
into these issues in greater depth.
Clearly the new realists raise important questions, and given our interest in real pol-
itics these questions cannot be swept under the carpet, nor would we wish to do so.
Indeed, from one perspective, the chapters in this Handbook represent a collective
response to the new realist perspective, a demonstration of how it is possible for IPT
to engage with real-​world problems without losing its sense of self, or its focus on nor-
mativity and prescription. As the Handbook unfolds it will, we hope, become clear
that the more compelling aspects of the new realist critique address a very narrow tar-
get, in particular theories of global justice, and leave much of the rest of the discourse
unscathed. As to the general critique of “ideal theory,” it will become apparent that, con-
tra the new realists, this is a term which has a number of different meanings, only one
of which involves a rejection of feasibility constraints (on which see Laura Valentini’s
Chapter 50). Likewise, others have shown that the new realist critique of moralism does
not always hit its mark (e.g. Estlund 2017).

Normative vs Positive/​E mpirical

Inquiry

In much contemporary literature on IR theory, normative claims are characterized as

value-​based, prescriptive claims about what ought to be done, whereas empirical or
positive claims are understood to be objective—​descriptions of social facts or social real-
ity. Positive theory and normative theory are understood to be distinct activities: posi-
tive theory tells us what can be done, normative theory tells us what should be done.
The mainstream discourse of International Relations stresses that these theories involve
categorically distinct claims. Normative prescriptions can be justified as appropriate, it
is argued, but they cannot be logically “proved” or empirically verified, just as the “social
facts” ascertained by empirical inquiry cannot be disputed because they are normatively
unsatisfying. These categorical differences are alleged to underpin the development of
normative and empirical inquiry as two very distinctive and highly specialized branches
of inquiry, with very little interest in or contact with each other.
 Introduction   11

Yet normative and empirical inquiry have not always been separated in this way, and
many branches of contemporary IR theory—​in particular the “constructivist” move-
ment—​refuse to accept that there is a categorical difference between the normative and
the positive. Certainly, the separation of normative and empirical inquiry has a long
history reaching its apotheosis with the neo-​positivist revolution in political science,
which saw behaviouralist approaches dominate in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury, particularly in the US; but the post-​positivist revolution in the social sciences has
since challenged this dominance, and neo-​positivism, while still important and per-
haps the majority position in contemporary political science, is no longer unchallenged.
However, and interestingly, the challenge to the positive–​normative binary has largely
focused on positive rather than on normative theory. In other words, while the preten-
sions to value-​neutrality of positive theory have been extensively critiqued, the empirical
insensitivity of normative inquiry has remained relatively unscathed until very recently.
It is now widely recognized that ethical issues permeate social scientific research, from
the selection of research questions, the conduct of research, the making of assumptions,
the development of categories of knowledge to the interpretation and dissemination of
research findings. Indeed, one of the tasks set for itself by the Oxford Handbook that
stimulated the existence of this series was to highlight how “every international relations
theory is simultaneously about what the world is like and about what it ought to be like”
either explicitly or implicitly (Reus-​Smit and Snidal 2008: 6). The assumption of norma-
tive or value neutrality in social scientific inquiry is no longer sustainable.
The second question guiding this Handbook explores whether and how far the charge
can run the other way. Is indifference towards “social facts” or empirical research by IPT
scholars sustainable? Under what circumstances, if any, can it be excused? The answer,
as we have already partly foreshadowed, depends on the mode of normative inquiry.
For those engaged in the interpretation of texts or meta-​ethical reflection, this charge
may not even be relevant, or may not apply in the same way. However, those engaged
in normative critique and the evaluation and reform of real-​world practices should, at
the very least, be obliged to get their social facts right if their normative judgements are
to have any traction. In principle, all normative theories make assumptions about the
nature of the social domain and the nature of individuals as agents within that domain,
which suggests an engagement with the empirical is not an option but a necessity (Price
2008; Price et al. 2012). Likewise, while an “ought” cannot readily be derived from an
“is,” “ought” nonetheless implies “can,” so those offering real-​world prescriptions in the
form of action-​guiding norms should be sure that their interventions can operate and
have effect in the world as intended. This should be a simple matter of due diligence, but
it is often avoided or evaded.
Indeed, critics have lamented what they see as a “dismal disconnection” between pol-
itical theory and empirical research (Stears 2005: 326). Rawls’s Theory of Justice reignited
normative political inquiry in the English-​speaking world and beyond from the 1970s,
but it also sent the inquiry down a certain path. Indeed, the Rawlsian industry became
excessively preoccupied with ideal, abstract theorizing about justice along with meta-​
normative reflection and was largely indifferent to issues of feasibility, empirical inquiry,
12    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

and practical reform at the very time at which the welfare state was being dismantled
(Stears 2005: 326). The aforementioned new realist critique was largely generated in
response to this preoccupation.
Most of those who have addressed the bifurcation between normative and empirical
research lament the strict separation but also rightly resist the idea that it can or should
be collapsed altogether (e.g. Stears 2005; Bauböck 2008; Price et al. 2012). Academic
specialization makes sense, and specializing in any or all of the normative modes of
inquiry we have outlined enables greater mastery in certain areas and thereby produces
a richer and deeper body of scholarship. But this still begs the question: in what ways
can greater attention to empirical research serve to enrich normative inquiry, or is it
only necessary to prevent embarrassment? Insofar as action-​guiding prescriptions or
meta-​normative reflection rest on assumptions about human motivation and behaviour
that are contradicted by theory-​guided, empirical research, then they can be impugned.
For just one example, feminist IPT scholars who wish to realize universal human
rights for all women by offering action-​guiding norms to end female oppression in its
many different guises are well advised to pay heed to empirical research on the conse-
quences of their prescriptions in different social and cultural settings. Indeed, feminist
policy interventions of this kind, such as in campaigns to end female genital cutting,
have sometimes backfired in harmful ways due to lack of local knowledge (Snyder and
Vinjamuri 2012: 441).
In summary, these are complex issues, and it is time now for us as editors to turn them
over to our contributors. As will be apparent, the forty-​nine chapters that follow this
introduction approach IPT from a number of directions; some of the topics addressed,
for example on the history of the discourse, do not invite a close engagement with real
politics or empirical research; others, for example on international public policy and
governance, have no value without such an engagement. Although we have posed the
same questions to each of our contributors, we have not attempted to enforce any kind
of uniformity in the way in which they answer them. The multiple faces of modern
International Political Theory is one of the most attractive features of the discourse, and
although the way in which we have organized the Handbook imposes a certain kind of
order, we have not looked to stifle this pluralism.

The Organization of the Handbook

The rest of this Handbook consists of forty-​nine chapters, arranged in nine parts; fol-
lowing this introduction, Parts II–VII are headed by an “anchor” or lead chapter which
provides an overview of the particular dimension of IPT covered therein or addresses
overarching themes or issues.
Part II, “History, Traditions, and Perspectives,” is designed to situate the discourse
of IPT both in terms of its past and in relation to cognate contemporary discourses.
In Chapter 2 David Boucher anchors the section with a discussion of the history of
 Introduction   13

international thought and an analysis of the process of reading texts in IPT. He distin-
guishes helpfully between the Emblematic, Practical, and Historical past, defending the
central importance of practice in our reading of the classics. This is followed by Chapter
3, in which Peter Sutch explores the recent history of the discourse and the usefulness
or otherwise of the binary, cosmopolitanism and communitarianism; he argues that
both terms remain relevant insofar as they are linked to an engagement with socio-
logical and constructivist approaches to IR. In Chapter 4 Chris Brown traces the rela-
tionship between IPT and the wider discourse of International Relations, arguing that
IPT preserves aspects of the discourse which the mainstream turn towards neo-​posi-
tivst modes of theorizing has discarded. Gerry Simpson in Chapter 5 explores the rela-
tionship between IPT and international law, identifying the split between conceptions
of law as the codification of the practice of states and law as a project for international
reform, examining the contemporary problems of intervention and the prosecution of
international crimes, and noting the turn of international lawyers back to the political
and to the history of international thought. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on perspectives that
are less linked to tradition and history. In Chapter 6 Seyla Benhabib and Anna Jurkevics
examine the evolution of critical theory from its cosmopolitan Frankfurt School roots
to its current eclecticism, incorporating deconstruction, feminist approaches, and post-​
colonialism, and a renewed focus on sovereignty. Laura Sjoberg in Chapter 7 explores
the contribution of feminism to international political theory, using the issue of male
prostitution and the military as an entry point to the discourse.
A major focus of contemporary IPT is international justice, covered extensively here in
Part III of the Handbook. Simon Caney leads this part by identifying five ways in which
empirical evidence is crucial for normative theorizing about international distributive
justice. These include but go beyond the usual issue of feasibility to include conceptu-
alizing the subject matter of international justice, formulating the questions that IPT
should answer, assessing the desirability of principles of global distributive justice, and
assessing their implications. Darrel Moellendorf illustrates many of these arguments in
Chapter 9 by providing an account of egalitarian international justice that is depend-
ent on an empirical understanding of real-world practice. In Chapter 10, Toni Erskine
examines the complex question of moral responsibility for international justice through
the prism of agency, structure, and the neglected dimension of luck. She shows how a
deeper reflection on the relationship between agency, chance, contingency, and causal
complexity can unsettle established understandings. Hilary Charlesworth explores the
relationship between international law and international justice in Chapter 11. She high-
lights the tensions between the traditional Westphalian conceptions of justice grounded
in respect for national sovereignty and the United Nations Charter conceptions of inter-
national justice that include a range of universal norms, including respect for human
rights. In Chapter 12 Susanne Buckley-​Zistel interrogates the burgeoning field of transi-
tional justice as a response to legacies of violence. She tracks the historical development
of transitional justice and teases out its different elements and normative foundations.
Will Kymlicka in Chapter 13 examines the “minority question” in international justice
debates by examining how minorities came onto the radar of international relations as
14    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

a problem to be contained and then evolved into bearers of internationally protected

minority rights but not to the point of defending place-​based rights for minorities. In
Chapter 14, Edward Page tracks the conceptual development of sustainable develop-
ment and its relationship to environmental justice, and draws out the normative ques-
tions that any theory of sustainable development must address.
An aspect of IPT which is both very traditional and very modern is covered in Part
IV, “International Political Theory of Violence and Conflict.” In Chapter 15 Anthony F.
Lang, Jr anchors the discussion, arguing that violence constrains and enables politics
and is constrained and enabled by politics. He focuses on violence and authority, argu-
ing that the latter notion receives too little attention in contemporary thought. This leads
into two chapters on the Just War. In Chapter 16 Cian O’Driscoll explores the Just War
tradition and its contemporary relevance, raising questions about the very definition of
war, and its applicability to acts of force short of war and anticipatory defence. Janina
Dill in Chapter 17 explores contemporary, individual rights-​oriented approaches, some-
times know as “revisionist” just war theory. According to this approach it may be impos-
sible to wage war in a morally appropriate way, which raises important questions about
the relationship between real and ideal theory. Still in contact with “just war” thinking,
in Chapter 18 Michael L. Gross investigates the moral dilemmas of asymmetric con-
flict, arguing that the conventional unwillingness to accept that non-​state actors could
be legitimate combatants is no longer sustainable. Christopher Coker in Chapter 19
assesses the impact of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs a.k.a. Drones) and autonomous
weapons systems, and their capacity to overturn all previous approaches to the ethics
of warfare; Thucydides describes war as “the human thing,” but the rise of killer robots
challenges this in a fundamental way. In Chapter 20, Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C.
Maness offer an assessment of cyber security, arguing that the common emphasis on
technology is mistaken; the appropriate framework for discussing cyber security has yet
to emerge, but clearly ethical concerns will be central when it does. Mary Elizabeth King,
in Chapter 21, explores non-​violent action in its various forms, stressing, somewhat
counterintuitively, the relationship between the core idea and realist political practice.
Part V examines “Humanitarianism and Human Rights.” In Chapter 22 Michael N.
Barnett anchors the discussion with an exploration of the different mindsets that are
associated with these two closely associated concepts and their distinctive relation-
ships to politics, noting that the discourse of humanitarianism is largely historical, while
human rights are usually discussed in conceptual terms. Stephen Hopgood in Chapter
23 looks at the real-​world politics of human rights, and anticipates a truncated role for
human rights in the future unless they can be divorced from their current Western, lib-
eral foundations. In Chapter 24, Jennifer M. Welsh examines the role played by humani-
tarian actors in times of conflict, with a particular focus on the UN, which she suggests
is developing new understandings of impartiality, which sometimes gel and sometimes
clash with the acvtivities of the new “rights-​based” humanitarian NGOs. This leads
into James Pattison’s discussion of the “Responsibility to Protect” in Chapter 25, which
emphasizes the gaps between theory and practice that have emerged as this attempt to
resolve the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention has evolved over the last decade. The
 Introduction   15

sometimes vexed relationship between gender, multiculturalism, and rights is explored

in Chapter 26 by Denise Walsh, who challenges the common assumption that a concern
for gender equality will always clash with the respect for difference that multiculturalism
mandates. In Chapter 27 Patrick Hayden examines the recent focus on health as a basic
human right, arguing that the foundations for this claim are best found in recognition
theory rather than in conventional liberal thinking on human rights. Finally in Part V,
Anthony J. Langlois in Chapter 28 focuses on the increasingly salient but highly contro-
versial area of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights, stressing the importance of
moving beyond the mere assertion that “gay rights are human rights” to an examination
of how these rights operate in real-​world politics, including ways in which they can be
misused.
Part VI addresses issues of “Democracy, Accountability, and Global Governance,”
which are central to the approach to IPT adopted in this Handbook. Carol C. Gould
sets the scene in Chapter 29 by exploring the context and the motivation for addressing
democratic deficits in global governance. She defends a “common activities” approach,
complemented by the “all-​affected” principle, as providing a more dynamic and for-
warding-​looking basis for addressing global democratic deficits. In Chapter 30 Terry
Macdonald develops a distinctive approach for reconciling global democratic values
with the empirical facts of contemporary global governance. Instead of “piggy-​backing”
off democratic theories developed at the national level, she develops an approach based
on the empowerment of collective agency. In Chapter 31, Eva Erman shifts attention to
the empirical and moral constraints on global democracy, understood as the conditions
under which democracy should be construed (i.e. formulated and justified) and pro-
moted in the real world of global politics. Milja Kurki continues this line of inquiry in
Chapter 32 by examining the contested ethics of democracy promotion. She argues that
democracy promotion nowadays tends to treat both democracy and its promotion as
largely a “technical” challenge, which obscures liberal ethical commitments and fails
to acknowledge the plurality of democratic ethics. In Chapter 33 Jens Steffek exam-
ines how ideas of deliberative democracy have been extended to governance beyond
the state. He argues that both micro and macro conceptions of deliberation have con-
siderable potential to enhance the epistemic quality of global governance, but that they
suffer from an elite bias and need to confront the challenge of developing thicker input
and accountability linkages with the lifeworlds of citizens. Kate Macdonald addresses
these linkages in Chapter 34 in her examination of accountability norms and practices
in global economic governance. She argues that normative analyses of transnational
accountability must begin with real-​world accountability problems, and she singles out
four: unaccountable power, decentred political authority, adapting to multiple scales,
and negotiating social and cultural difference. In Chapter 35 Frank Biermann tackles the
daunting challenge of global governance in the Anthropocene, a new and self-​endan-
gering epoch in planetary history where humans have acquired geological (and not just
environmental) agency in reshaping Earth systems processes.
Part VII takes a more practical turn, focusing on “Ethics and International Public
Policy.” Chapter 36 by Christian Barry anchors this section by exploring how IPT should
16    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

relate to public policy. Using Rawls’s duty of assistance as an illustration, he examines

the degree to which normative principles should be abstract or concrete, and specific
or indeterminate, and he shows that abstractness is a virtue when experts disagree. Tim
Dunne, in Chapter 37, examines the meaning of ethical foreign policy in a multipolar
world. He argues that ethics and foreign policy have always been awkward partners,
despite efforts by some realists to sever ethics and efforts by (mostly) liberals to bring
ethics more to the fore at various times, and he offers a sober prognosis of a retreating
liberalism in an increasingly multipolar world. Nicole Hassoun addresses the question
of fair trade in theory and practice in Chapter 38. Arguing against both complete theor-
etical accounts of fair trade as well as practice-​based approaches, she defends a condi-
tional approach that enables modest progress. Luara Ferracioli in Chapter 39 explores
the public policy dimension of international migration and human rights, asking what
would be the moral duties of liberal states in relation to different categories of migrant
if they were willing to apply liberal cosmopolitan principles of justice, and what institu-
tional changes would help to motivate states to do so. In Chapter 40 Steve Vanderheiden
addresses the vexed question of climate equity in the real world in light of the 2015 Paris
Agreement. Against the view that commitments to equity in the climate regime have
only obstructed progress and that equity should be traded off for an effective treaty,
he argues that the inclusion of substantive and procedural equity considerations have
focused attention upon subjects and issues that might otherwise have been ignored.
The question of the ethical rationale for international aid is taken up by Paul Collier in
Chapter 41. He defends minimal obligations that are reducible to two “duties of rescue,”
one immediate (in response to catastrophes) and one prospective (development assist-
ance), that seek to ameliorate mass despair for those with no credible hope for a better
life, and argues that development assistance based on “mutual aid” rather than charity
is ethically permissible if it can be shown to be the most effective means of fulfilling the
duty of rescue. Fiona Robinson in Chapter 42 defends a feminist practical ethics of care
as an appropriate global ethic, using the challenges of humanitarianism as an illustra-
tion. This approach is shown to be context-​specific, relational, and located in the experi-
ences and practices of care-​giving and receiving rather than a priori principles of the
right or the good.
Parts VIII and IX are somewhat different from the earlier parts of the Handbook,
and do not have “anchor” chapters. Part VIII, “New Directions in International Political
Theory,” picks out five areas where new perspectives are emerging, or in some cases re-​
emerging. In Chapter 43 Friedrich Kratochwil offers a conceptual sketch of new, and
old, thinking on the issue of judgement; he argues that the formal logic of writers such
as Kant may be less use than the insights provided by common-​law interpretation,
Humean common sense, and Aristotelian phronesis. Continuing this classical theme,
in Chapter 44, Steve Torrente and Harry D. Gould consider the impact of virtue ethics
on IPT, exploring the renewed interest in Aristotle and, in particular, the capabilities
approach associated with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Renée Jeffery in Chapter
45 examines and contributes to the new literature on the role of emotions in inter-
national political theory; Sen also features in her account of the rise of a “sentimental
 Introduction   17

cosmopolitanism,” although she places greater emphasis than he on the combination of

reason and emotion in the making of impartial judgements. In Chapter 46 Anna Geis
explores the international dimension of recent work on recognition, highlighting the
danger that the self-​recognition of the West as a benign force in world politics may not
satisfy the need for recognition of non-​Western, non-​liberal actors. Finally, in Chapter
47, Steven Slaughter examines the increasing importance of republican thought for IPT,
exploring the different versions of republicanism current in the literature. Non-​dom-
ination is central to most versions, but can be pursued in different ways with those ver-
sions of republicanism influenced by critical theory offering a different model to that of
globalized sovereignty.
Part IX, “For and Against Real Politics and International Political Theory,” is an exer-
cise in self-​criticism in which the core themes of the Handbook are challenged from
three different directions. In Chapter 48 Duncan Bell explodes a number of common
myths about realism—​that it is amoral, necessarily state-​centric, and conservative—​
and shows that realists can be conservative, liberal, or radical, even utopian in certain
senses. What unites realists is their rejection of “moralism” and their attentiveness to
the hard and soft political constraints on efforts to realize normative arguments for a
just international order. Continuing the themes of power and conflict, albeit from a
different angle, Andrew Davenport offers a Marxist critique of IPT in Chapter 49. He
argues that IPT, both in its conceptualization of the international space and in its ideas
of how to address and resolve problems such as inequality and violence, rests on an
essentially liberal experience of the world and therefore on a critique of distributive
justice that fails to comprehend the depth and extent of the power of capital. In Chapter
50 Laura Valentini rounds out the debate by providing a defence of “ideal theory,”
understood either as idealizations or as normative theories that are insensitive to feasi-
bility constraints. She concludes that most criticisms miss their mark, either because
they mistake the role that idealizations play, or mistake purely evaluative theories as
offering prescriptions rather than standards of evaluation.

In addition to providing an authoritative survey of the issues, debates, and traditions

that preoccupy contemporary IPT scholarship, this Handbook seeks to prod IPT schol-
ars to engage with the new realist turn in political theory as well as the turn to non-​ideal
theory in normative theory, and to reflect more generally on the multi-​faceted relation-
ship between normative theory, empirical research, and the so-​called real world. IPT
scholars have tended to avoid any critical engagement with IR realist theory, mistakenly
assuming the entire tradition to be, at best, purely explanatory rather than normative or,
at worst, amoral. Meanwhile, the new realist assault on idealistic or “moralistic” liberal
political philosophy has not been especially preoccupied by what is distinctive about the
international or the global compared to the domestic political sphere. Our view of the
timeliness of this engagement is shared, it seems, by others. Since the chapters for this
Handbook were commissioned, two special journal issues have appeared that engage
with these or similar questions (see Floyd 2016 and Sabl and Sagar 2017 for introduc-
tions to each issue). We hope the engagement in this Handbook will encourage greater
18    Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley

reflexivity regarding what is unique about IPT so that it may be better appreciated, and
about the interrelationships and dependencies between IPT, other modes of inquiry,
and the real world of international politics.

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 Pa rt I I

H I STORY,
T R A DI T ION S , A N D
P E R SP E C T I V E S
 ­c hapter 2

H istory of Int e rnat i ona l

Thoug h t
Text and Context

David Boucher

The history of thought in International Relations is integral to international political

theory; it was always an activity fully immersed in immediate political events, and was
frequently explicit about offering analyses and inferring conclusions for statesmen to
draw upon in their foreign encounters. Herodotus, for example, tells us that he pre-
served the memory of the past by recording “the astonishing achievements both of our
own and other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict”
(Herodotus 1972: 41). The whole range of “literature,” including ephemera, epic poems,
plays, speeches, and other utterances ranging from the stray observation to the ideo-
logical and philosophical, are available for us to invoke in explaining and understanding
past and contemporary problems in International Relations.
It is important, however, to distinguish the level of analysis at which such reflection
was conducted. Each utterance implicates a world of ideas, within which it acquires
greater intelligibility (Boucher 2016). At the lower levels of abstraction, it is we who have
to do the work of relating various statements of policy or passing observation to the
world of ideas in which its force, or point, is realized. Such intelligibility is an achieve-
ment rather than a given, and the higher we ascend the scale of abstraction the more
adept the thinker, or theorist, at providing the principles and arguments that under-
pin the conclusions. While Sophocles’ Antigone relies upon the conception of a world
in which there are universal duties relating to natural law, and Cicero provides glimpses
of its implications for men and citizens generally, it is the likes of Grotius and Pufendorf
who synthesize and provide the philosophical justifications for how individuals and
states should conduct themselves in their relations with each other.
It may well be the case that one of the difficulties of studying Grotius (2005), for
example, in Martin Wight’s view, is the Dutchman’s “ambiguity [which] stems not least
from his inaccessibility” (Wight 2005: 31). If we are to bring Grotius into service, and
22   David Boucher

assess the importance of his attempt to subject international relations to the rule of law,
it is incumbent upon us to overcome the barriers to intelligibility by identifying the
worlds of ideas his words invoke. Indeed, if we are to understand Grotius’s importance,
in the history of both political and international thought, we must not only understand
his achievement in his own time but also his relation to the voluminous classic sources
he cites. His contemporary relevance is comprehensible only when we understand the
Grotian revival following the First Hague Conference of 1899 (Jeffery 2006).
Furthermore, there are many worlds of ideas which Thomas Hobbes’s thought impli-
cates, not all of which are relevant to International Relations, and what we now regard as
his seminal contribution has not always been acknowledged. For example, his equation
of international relations with the state of nature and the war of all against all, i.e. inter-
national anarchy, was eclipsed for his immediate contemporaries and successors by his
contribution to the natural law tradition, represented by Pufendorf, Wolff, and Vattel, in
expounding the basic principles of international law (Covell 2004; Boisen and Boucher
2011; Armitage 2013; and see Chapter 5).
In response to the frequent lament that there was an actual, or imagined, paucity of clas-
sic texts to which to introduce putative students of International Relations (Mackintosh
1843 [1799]; Wight 1966; 1987; 1991; Forsyth et al. 1970; Parkinson 1977; Williams 1990;
Knutsen 1992; Pangle and Ahrensdorf 1999; Keene 2005; Armitage 2013), a veritable ava-
lanche of studies in books and learned journals has brought to light a rich and fascinat-
ing array of international relations thought. The reader will immediately be struck by the
variability of the quality of this thought, and the range of uses for which it is employed.

The Emblematic, Practical,

and Historical Pasts

There is a need to distinguish between the purposes for which texts in international
thought were written, and these may be differentiated by the attitudes each text has
to the past and its relation to the present. There is a past with which we are familiar,
populated by significant events, heroes and villains who are emblematic of character
traits, vices, and virtues, and momentous occasions. They represent shorthand evo-
cations of a position or idea, which often does not, and need not, stand up to critical
scrutiny—​or is indeed impervious to it (Oakeshott 1983: 40–​4). Despite what revision-
ists may say (Walker 1993), in this past such figures as Machiavelli, Mussolini, or Hitler
maintain their places unvarnished, while others, such as Augustine, Francis of Assisi,
and Winston Churchill, irrespective of repeated exposure of their flaws, remain untar-
nished. More generally in the literature, this emblematic past manifests itself in the form
of significations, in which a thinker, such as Bodin, or an event, encapsulated by the
term “Westphalia” (Osiander 1994) represents the idea of sovereignty (e.g. Waltz 1959;
Wight 1966; 1987; Bull 1977; Bietz 1999; Wendt 1999).
 History of International Thought    23

In this vision of the past—​the emblematic past—​Machiavelli represents the personi-

fication of evil (Strauss, 1978), or at the very least is the most ruthless exponent of the
doctrine of raison d’état (Meinecke 1997). One might even call it a mythic past, used for
purposes of valorization, inspiration, or vilification. It is a world of simple contrasts with
few shades of grey, in which Hitler is a demonic villain, Chamberlain a weak appeaser,
and Churchill and Roosevelt heroic saviours. Chamberlain’s speech in front of 10
Downing Street, for example, following the Munich Conference of 30 September 1938,
is emblematic of self-​delusion and failure: “for the second time in our history, a British
Prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is
peace for our time” (Montefiore n.d.: 85). Gandhi’s speech on the eve of his “Salt March”
on 11 March 1930 is emblematic of non-​violent civil disobedience against colonialism
(see Chapter 21): “let there be no semblance of breach of peace even after all of us have
been arrested. We have resolved to utilize all our resources in pursuit of an exclusively
non-​violent struggle [ . . . ] I have faith in the righteousness of our cause and the purity of
our weapons” (Montefiore 2014: 66–​8).
The emblematic past comprised not only statesmen and women who had made
an indelible mark, but also political thinkers who were taken to represent, or were
unequivocally hailed to be indicative of, a position or state of affairs. Both Machiavelli
and Hobbes, for Leo Strauss, epitomize the first wave of modernity and the advent of
relativism in morals by rejecting the classical tradition (Strauss 1988; 1963). The use of
traditions in International Relations itself is emblematic (Walker 1993: 27–​31; Der Derian
1988: 190; Clark 1996: 1; Jeffery 2005: 57–​84; 2006: 17–​25). Of the realist or Hobbesian
tradition, Donald Hanson (1984: 331) complains: “There is, in any case, a recognisable
‘Hobbesian tradition’ in the study of international relations, whether it has been faithful
to Hobbes or not” (Malcolm 2002: 433). Even though Martin Wight is the great exponent
of traditions in the history of thought in International Relations, he was not oblivious
to their shortcomings. He acknowledges that when a proper name becomes an adjec-
tive attached to a manner of thinking, “it falsifies the man possessing the name [ . . . ]
Grotius was not a Grotian [ . . . ] Machiavelli was not a Machiavellian simply” (Wight
2005: 5). Such events and persons, invoked for their practical purpose in contemporary
politics, are “abstracted from record in a reading which divests them of their contin-
gent circumstances and their authentic utterance; symbolic and stereotypic personae,
actions, exploits and situations” (Oakeshott 1983: 38). Such events or persons are on per-
manent loan to the present as symbols of all the vices and virtues of humanity.
The emblematic past shares with the practical past a didactic character: while the
former has achieved almost mythic status, the latter is more sensitive to historical inter-
pretation, and critical of caricatures, with the purpose of shedding light on our present
states of affairs. Because of its emphasis upon the usefulness of the past, the practical past
is often open to the charge of anachronism, i.e. looking at the past through the wrong
end of the telescope, not for its own sake, but because of its significance for the present.
The predominant attitude of commentators on the history of thought in International
Relations is practical. The ideas of the past are explored in relation to present problems
to help us understand them better, or to help extract us from intractable predicaments
24   David Boucher

(e.g. Linklater 1990; Brown 1992; 2010; 2012; Williams 1992; Walker 1993; 2010; Onuf
1998; Rawls 1999; Pangle and Ahrensdorf 1999; Jahn 2000; Anghie 2004; Schmitt 2006;
Pateman and Mills 2007; Boucher 2009; Rengger 2013; Lang 2015). This doesn’t mean
that principles or rules are simply applied to contemporary problems in order to arrive
at resolutions. The relation between theory and practice is more complicated than that.
As R. G. Collingwood (1993) indicates, theory arises out of practice, and to practice
returns for its resolution. The study of the past is not for its own sake, but for self-​know-
ledge of the mind. Knowing of what human beings are capable; what achievements are
attainable, somehow vicariously experiencing what they experience, enables us better to
think through our own problems (Collingwood 2013). Using Aristotle and Nussbaum,
and rejecting (as Collingwood did) Kant’s regularian or rule-​based practice, is called by
Chris Brown the “Practice Turn,” or phronesis, in International Relations Theory (Brown
2012: 448). He denies, for example, the Western hegemony of cosmopolitan values: they
do not exist, nor could they be created, because of the cultural pluralism of the modern
world. Any such project rests on a misunderstanding of the variety of cultures that con-
stitute the contemporary world, and a misreading of what the Enlightenment was all
about. Using the infamous “Requirement” (Council of Castile 1513)—​which is indica-
tive of the most significant meeting of cultures in the modern world, between European
Christians and American infidels—​to help him think through the modern-​day tension
between universal values and cultural heterodoxy, Brown (2010: 19–​20) contends that it
is testimony to the need for normative theory in International Relations.
Because of the linguistic incomprehension between the New World and the Old, and
the frequently cynical manner of its reading, the juridical act of ordering indigenous
peoples to submit to the dominion of the king of Spain has often been ridiculed as absurd.
The point that Brown wants to make with respect to the reading of the “Requerimiento”
to the Indians, which offered them an opportunity to submit to the Spanish Crown and
receive the Gospel or be responsible for the catastrophe that would befall them, was that
it was an act of self-​justification and moral absolution, and in this it was an abject fail-
ure. There was no moral dialogue between the conquistadors and the Indians, but nor
did it satisfy critics at home, because it failed to allay subsequent debate about the moral
status of the Indians (Brown 2010: 20). Brown uses the “Requerimiento” not to attain
a better understanding of the relationship between the Spanish and American Indians
for its own sake, but instead to pose and answer a practical problem: “The key question
is whether at the end of the Vasco da Gama epoch it is possible to come closer to a real
moral conversation than it was at the beginning” (2010: 21). The reason is to avoid rerun-
ning the “farce” of the “Requerimiento” in the twenty-​first century (Brown 2010: 27).
R. B. J. Walker, for example, attempts to rescue Machiavelli from the caricature that the
idealists vilify and the realists deify, not because he wants to make claims about what
Machiavelli really thought, but “rather, to indicate one way of identifying some of the
discursive practices that have turned an historical problematic into an ahistorical apol-
ogy for the violence of the present” (Walker 1993: 31). Some are of the view that we may
even ask of past theorists what view they would take of specific events if they were alive
today (Lebow, Schouten, and Suganami, 2016).
 History of International Thought    25

The third attitude towards the past is the Historical. It claims to be a purer attitude
in its faithfulness to the purposes and intentions of the authors it takes as its subject
matter (Muldoon 1979; Pagden 1993; Tuck 1999; Boucher 1998; Keene 2005; Bell 2002,
2007; Covell 2009; Armitage 2000; 2013; Boisen 2013; Christov 2015). David Armitage,
for example, self-​consciously attempts to elevate the study of thought in International
Relations to parallel the level achieved in the history of political thought as a conse-
quence of the methodological debates precipitated by Peter Laslett, J. G. A. Pocock,
John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner (Boucher 1985; Tully 1988; Hall 2015). Armitage
claims, somewhat hyperbolically, that up until the 1990s historians of political thought
tended to ignore the international dimension, while students of International Relations
“remained largely uninterested in historicising the theories invoked in their field”
(Armitage 2013: 4).
In order to differentiate this attitude to the past from what I have called the emblem-
atic and practical, Armitage refers to “international intellectual history” whose subject
matter is “international thought.” Theodore Christov (2015: 4) designates it “modern
international thought,” a term that was in vogue in the 1920s. The purpose of such his-
tory is to locate the foundations, or origins, of international thought in the early modern
period, and by implication subject to scrutiny the claims made by contemporary schol-
ars of International Relations about the foundational status to the discipline of such
thinkers as Hobbes, Burke, and Bentham (Armitage 2013: 13; Boucher 2015).
Armitage argues that Hobbes’s canonical position among the progenitors of inter-
national thought, standing between Grotius and Kant, contrasts starkly with the rela-
tive silence of his philosophical commentators on the external relations of Leviathan.
Indeed, among international theorists writing on Hobbes, Armitage dismissively
claims: “there is little of genuine historical character” (Armitage 2013: 60). Armitage
contends that, pace the view of International Relations theorists, Hobbes’s adoption as
the paramount theorist of international anarchy is of recent origin.

The Space of Experience, Horizons

of Expectations, and Levels of Analysis

Reinhart Koselleck makes a useful conceptual distinction between the “space of experi-
ence” and “horizon of expectation.” The expressions “experience” and “expectation”
are formal categories and do not in themselves convey any substantive content. What
is experienced and what is expected may not be deduced from the categories them-
selves, but no history is possible without the experiences and expectations of human
agents. The concepts are mutually dependent: “No expectation without experience, no
experience without expectation” (Koselleck 2004: 257). Koselleck refers to the “space of
experience” and the “horizon of expectation” in order to distinguish between the pres-
ence of the past (experience) and the presence of the future (expectation). The space
26   David Boucher

of experience, i.e. the range of experiences open to us, gives rise to the possibility of
differing expectations, which may in certain circumstances encourage the creation of
concepts that contain a prognostic potential, and which no longer “register experience”
but instead generate it (p. 272). Koselleck argues: “when considered with respect to their
temporal extension, the manner in which these concepts are formed testifies to a con-
scious separation of space of experience and horizon of expectation, and it becomes the
task of political action to bridge this difference” (p. 272).
Thinking about International Relations, and most other practices, such as art, eth-
ics, or religion, may take place at different levels of abstraction, which have their own
distinctive characters. Bernard Bosanquet’s History of Aesthetic (1922) divides the
study of aesthetics into three main pursuits. In the first place we have the works of art
themselves, incorporating the experiences, thoughts, and feelings they presuppose.
Secondly, Bosanquet designates criticism, including writings on art that aim to improve
it, attempt to describe particular works, or attempt to direct what the artist should
produce. Thirdly, there is aesthetic theory, “the aim of which is neither to describe, to
improve, or direct, but simply to theorize, to put this art experience into relation with
the whole” (Oakeshott 2010: 131). Translating these categories into the history of thought
in International Relations, we may distinguish the type of thinking that relates imme-
diately to circumstances; attempts to synthesize experience into principles and recom-
mendations, or guides to action; and the philosophical consideration of the place of
International Relations in experience more generally. None of these levels of consider-
ation is immune from being invoked emblematically, practically, or historically.
At the level of immediate experience, the student of International Relations may be
provided with invaluable insights by memoirs of participants; contributions to foreign
policies; records of state affairs, which contribute to policy; minutes; policy papers;
legislation; or records of speeches encompassing the political activity and office of gov-
erning. We may expect to find certain recommendation about ends to be pursued and
means to achieve them. At this level the student of international thought attempts to
discover how people thought when they addressed pressing political problems, i.e. their
space of experience. In this respect, Thucydides, rather than Plato, reveals how ancient
Athenians thought about political problems (Thucydides 1972; cf. Herodotus 1972). The
codices, which include the icnocuicatl (Songs of Sorrow) which together constitute The
Broken Spears (Leon-​Portillo 1992), give us the point of view of the vanquished Aztecs,
the other side of the story from that of the “Requerimiento.” Tenochtitlan (Mexico City)
fell not so much because of Iberian cultural and military superiority, but because of
the thousands of native warriors who joined Cortés against the Aztecs; the devastating
European diseases; and the belief that Cortés was the returning man-​god Quetzalcoatl,
god of wisdom (Leon-​Portillo 1992: 23–​4, 92–​3, 132–​4). The Codex Florentino tells how
the Spaniards were sickened by the sacrificial blood sprinkled over their food on the
orders of Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, ruler of the Mexica (Aztecs) between 1502 and
1520, because he “ ‘believed in them” and worshipped them as deities. That is why they
were called ‘Gods who have come from heaven’ ” (Leon-​Portillo 1992: 93–​4), and that is
why they were welcomed at first with little resistance.
 History of International Thought    27

Other such materials may include, for example, the texts of international treaties and
agreements (Roberts and Guelff 2010; Brownlie and Goodwin-​Gill 2006). Three docu-
ments in particular, collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia, have a central place
in the study of International Relations thought; they are the answers to practical prob-
lems, and for modern commentators convey a horizon of expectation which contem-
poraneously they did not have. The terms and formal language of the treaties have to
be distinguished from what they came politically to signify. The emblematic view of
the Peace of Westphalia identifies the occasion of the acceptance of self-​imposed con-
straints by states out of enlightened rational self-​interest, signifying for the first time the
formal recognition and equality of state sovereignty. The Peace of Westphalia has long
become emblematic of formal recognition of sovereignty and the emergence of a society
or system of European states of whose legal framework Grotius is the founding father
(Manning 1839: 21; Covell 2009: 2). David Held, for example, contends that the Peace
of Westphalia “entrenched, for the first time, the principle of territorial sovereignty in
inter-​state affairs” (1995: 77). Its importance, we are told, was that it embodied an “early
formalisation of the idea that sovereignty was not simply a characteristic of individual
states, but was also a principle that should govern relations between states” (Murphy
1996: 92). The historical character of the Peace of Westphalia was quite different from,
and significantly more complex than, its emblematic or practical character (Keene 2005:
240–​3; Walker 2010: 130–​5). The issue of sovereignty serves to illustrate the difference
between the emblematic and the historical characters of the Peace of Westphalia. The
legal concept of sovereignty, however, although widely discussed among political the-
orists for more than a century before the Peace, was not central to the negotiations,
except perhaps in Spain’s recognition of the United Provinces. Instead, non-​legal auton-
omy was the idea that dominated thinking that addressed the aspirations of states. This
included self-​determination of states within the German empire, as well as for the major
states of Europe. The German principalities, for example, claimed their autonomy as a
matter of ancient right, and looked to the settlement to acknowledge rather than grant
it. The Peace reflected the interests of its architects, France, Sweden, and Holland, and
did not represent the conscious establishment of a new system or state-​centred inter-
national society. The predominant view was that the settlement should re-​establish the
status quo that prevailed before the Thirty Years War.
The second level of thinking about International Relations takes the form of reflec-
tion in terms of general principles that arise from the immediate context but never-
theless recommend themselves as guides to political conduct, typically in the form of
precepts for action, or ideological principles. Here the thinker rises above the imme-
diate concerns of international politics, and draws general conclusions from his or her
observations and reflections. In considering thought of this kind, the historian of pol-
itical thought has to identify how and why these general ideas emerged and came to be
erected into general principles, understand what forms of behaviour they represent, and
consider the role they play.
Among such “ideological” texts are those of Confucius (1989), Sun Tzu (1993),
Machiavelli (2003), and Clausewitz (1993). Machiavelli, operating at this second level,
28   David Boucher

exhibits a practical attitude towards the past, but not for the reasons that are usually
attributed to him. He thought lessons could be learnt from the past because “men have,
and always have had, the same passions, whence it necessarily comes about that the same
effects are produced” (Machiavelli 2003: bk III, ch. 43, 517). When Machiavelli offered
his Prince to Lorenzo de’ Medici, it contained a distillation of his experience in foreign
affairs, comprising maxims by which the prince could mitigate caprice in his internal
and external relations. He didn’t suggest that the answers are timeless, but instead that
the manner of thinking and engaging with a world in continuous flux is indicative of the
universal predicament of the quest for security in a dangerous and unpredictable world.
Necessity, chance, and individual personality affect circumstances, and circumstances
have a tendency to deceive us. As Machiavelli admitted, “one never finds any issue that
is clear cut and not open to question” (Machiavelli 2003: bk I, ch. 6, 121). He was him-
self recommending the “practice” turn in conceptualizing the space of experience,
and realistically constraining the horizon of expectation of the prince. That does not
imply, however, that we ourselves are limited to his horizon of expectation: “Machiavelli
poses questions about political community and practice that may still be pursued even
though his answers expose his own limited historical and conceptual horizon” (Walker
1993: 31).
In addition, thinking about politics may lend itself to philosophical reflection, the
impetus for which is to place governments and their relations, and political activity in
general, in the landscape of human activity as a whole, in order to identify their distinct-
ive postulates. We expect something different from Pericles’ funeral oration and Plato’s
Republic, and we do not judge them by the same criteria. For Michael Oakeshott this is
political philosophy proper, and it is the sort of thinking that we encounter in Plato’s
Republic, Spinoza’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy
of Right (Oakeshott 1975: 3). They constitute the highest achievement in Western pol-
itical thought. These are examples of grand theory, in which international relations are
located within the widest possible explanatory frameworks, rooted in the development
of the mind, psychology, theology, society, and human flourishing, and more often than
not in a cosmology.
Even though Hobbes represents the highest level of abstract thinking, he is not
immune from occupying a place in the emblematic past: “Describing International
Relations (IR) as a realm of Hobbesian anarchy” remains one of the most popular short-
hand descriptions of the nature of world politics. To invoke Hobbes is to call forth the
image of a world of conflict and perpetual danger, a “Realist vision of international
politics as a ‘state of nature’ defined by continual insecurity, competition and conflict”
(Williams 2006: 253).
In addition, some historians, such as Quentin Skinner, want to deny the character of
political philosophy. No piece of political writing, Skinner claims, can rise above the sec-
ond level of reflection. We must bring political philosophers back down to earth from
the realms of philosophical abstraction, and acknowledge that even the most abstract
are never above the fray and always part of the ideological battle itself (Skinner 2008: xv).
 History of International Thought    29

Authors of philosophical systems are of less significance and importance, for Skinner,
than their contributions to ideological debates surrounding, for example, the moral sci-
ences in Renaissance culture, political obligation during the Engagement Controversy,
or liberty during the English Civil Wars (Skinner 1996: 6).
Carl Schmitt takes Hobbes to be intervening in the political and opening a new
horizon of expectation, one which was eventually to lead to the age of the neutraliza-
tion and depoliticization of politics. Genuine political theories, he argues, presuppose
that man is dangerous (Schmitt 2006: 95; 2007: 61). But man is no ordinary animal,
because his weapons are far more lethal than those of any beast. This is the “Hobbesian
Dangerousness-​Relation” (Schmitt 2015: 44). Humanity is able to overcompensate for
its biological weaknesses in monstrous ways by technological inventions. Hobbes’s
horizon of expectation could hardly have envisaged the human capacity to develop
weapons of annihilation on the modern scale. The space of experience in terms of
which Hobbes comprehended the state was already a superhuman superpower, an arti-
ficial man, the machine that superseded all machines, and exceeding all consensus.
Today, Schmitt argues, power is beyond the control of anyone, greater than the will
to power, stronger than the goodness of humanity and also stronger than human evil
(Schmitt 2015: 47).
The key nexus in Hobbes was for Schmitt that of “protection-​obedience.” Schmitt
made the bold claim: “No form of order, no reasonable legitimacy or legality can exist
without protection and obedience” (2007: 52). The state machine guarantees an indi-
vidual’s physical security and in return demands “unconditional obedience to the laws
by which it functions” (Schmitt 2008: 45). The Leviathan was not the defender, but the
creator of peace. If protection ceases, the obligation to obey ceases, and the individ­
ual’s natural freedom reverts to him. The state possesses the right of war, the power to
require of its citizens that they are ready to sacrifice their lives and without reservation
kill the state’s enemies. It is in this respect that “the political community transcends all
other associations or societies” (2007: 47). Hobbes’s sovereign stands above society,
and is able to make genuine decisions about the exceptional; he is able to distinguish
friends from enemies; and he has the monopoly on the right of war. It was in the sphere
of International Relations that the Leviathan reached its highest level of mythical force.
Constant danger characterized the sphere in which the mighty Leviathans wrestled with
each other. It was a technically neutral state in which the values of truth and justice were
absorbed by abolishing the distinction between auctoritas and potestas. The supreme
power became the supreme authority. Auctoritas non veritas facit legem: authority and
not truth makes the law.
In summary, although Hobbes had his faults, he attracted Schmitt because he empha-
sized the importance of fear as a motive for the establishment of political authority,
and had understood what was intrinsically political about the arena of political action,
namely the ability to distinguish between friends and enemies. Conflict played a vital
role in establishing the state and guaranteeing its validity. The legitimacy of the state
lay in the eternal principle of protection/​obedience, and failure to uphold it was fatal to
30   David Boucher

any nation. Of particular importance, Hobbes identified the crucial distinction between
the political and all other particular interests in civil society, excluding them, in his
qualitative conception of the state, from political interference. He saw the need for the
sovereign to exercise a form of authority unconstrained by rules, or the rule of law, in
moments when decisiveness was of the essence, in circumstances for which there were
no rules for guidance. In other words, Hobbes was important because he was very like
Schmitt himself!
For Noel Malcolm, Hobbes’s place in the emblematic and ideological pasts are
inappropriate, and has resulted in the Hobbes of modern International Relations Theory
becoming ossified, rendering him at best an ideal type and “at worst as a caricature”
(2002: 433). Malcolm rejects the depiction of Hobbes as a portrayer of an amoral state
of nature. Instead, Hobbes is claimed to envisage each individual, and by implication
each state, having to examine the circumstances of each decision in relation to natural
law. Hobbes’s international agents are completely devoid of any of the characteristics
that Machiavelli attributes to the Prince, and are “strongly against wars of aggression or
aggrandisement” (p. 441). Political practices generally require to be legitimated, which
entails being able to demonstrate that Hobbes’s actions could be characterized with ref-
erence to accepted values or principles.

Conclusion

Attitudes to the history of thought in International Relations have been divided into
the emblematic, practical, and historical, while the levels of thinking about such rela-
tions were conceived in terms of their immediacy to events; reflections which distilled
principles or formulated recommendations for general guidance; and the philosophical.
None of which, I suggested, was immune from being brought into service by any of the
three specified attitudes to the past. Furthermore, I contended that the “practice” turn
was exactly what many of the great theorists anticipated, i.e. not the application of a set
of rules or principles for the resolution of present practical problems, but a set of pro-
cedures and considerations that we might employ to think our own way through the
problems, cognizant of the fact that their space of experience, and horizon of expect-
ation, could not help but be more limited than our own.
All this points to a methodological pluralism, an essential tension, that invites each
student of the history of thought in International Relations to test the manner of his or
her use of the past against that of others, and to justify the methods of enquiry employed
within the heterodoxy of reasons and uses for which the thought of past figures in
International Relations is brought into service. As a consequence of this methodological
pluralism, the caricatures of “great thinkers” that once populated the pages of tracts of
international political theory in the postwar years are much less acceptable; they have
to meet far greater degrees of academic rigour, and at the very least exhibit a methodo-
logical self-​consciousness, or awareness, of interdisciplinary criteria.
 History of International Thought    31

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 ­c hapter 3

T he Sl ow Norma l i z at i on
of Norm at i v e
P olitical T h e ory
Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism
Then and Now

Peter Sutch

This chapter focuses on attempts to link the normative criticisms and prescriptions of
International Political Theory (IPT) with the critical, empirical, and sociological ambi-
tions of International Relations (IR). Revisiting the cosmopolitan/​communitarian
debate might seem an unlikely vehicle for such an enterprise. The description of IPT
that divided normative scholarship into cosmopolitan and communitarian camps drew
much criticism and, arguably, reinforced the divide between IR and political theory. The
debate put political theorists into conversation with political theorists on the theme of
global or international justice, rather than putting political theory in conversation with
other aspects of IR. Yet reflection upon the twenty-​five years since the cosmopolitan/​
communitarian distinction provided initial focus to the (re)emergence of IPT shows
that two things stand out. First, despite the many well-​founded criticisms of the way
the cosmopolitan/​communitarian debate conceived of the theoretical debates in IPT,
and of the ways political theorists conducted those debates, it has proven remarkably
difficult to escape or transcend the core features of cosmopolitanism and communi-
tarianism in IPT. Attempts to qualify or hyphenate core terms, and to abandon them
altogether to find new ones, have not really recast the core concerns of IPT. Second, not-
withstanding this first claim, the critical work done in response to the challenges of the
early debates has left a more mature and refined IPT, one less insistent on drawing sharp
lines between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism (or their various progeny) or
between IPT and IR. There is still real critical merit in conversations between cosmopol-
itans and non-​cosmopolitans on matters of meta-​ethics and global justice, but some of
36   Peter Sutch

the most interesting and important work is now happening at the interface between IPT
and empirical, sociological, and legal studies in IR. It is here, this chapter contends, that
the contemporary debates between cosmopolitans engaging with the socio-​legal fabric
of international society and new communitarians engaging with the normative implica-
tions of evolving transnational and global communities are effecting the normalization
of IPT.
Chris Brown’s critique of his own presentation of the cosmopolitan/​communitar-
ian debate captures the peculiar relationship many political theorists have with the
distinction.

Although these terms will turn up quite frequently in what follows, this distinction
is not, in fact, a suitable basis for classification. It obscures more than it clarifies; too
many writers who seem to be in one camp cross over to the other at crucial points.
There is a real distinction to be made between cosmopolitan and communitarian
thought, but it cannot be made to bear too much weight—​and there is no other clas-
sification that does much better in this respect. (Brown 2002: 17)

While we have learned much from attempts to amend and transcend the terms of the
debate, there is something fundamental about these broadly drawn categories that
means they still structure moral reflection on international affairs. Nevertheless, all the
critical work in response to the limitations of the cosmopolitan/​communitarian debate
has not been in vain. The second claim this chapter defends is that the cutting edge of
contemporary cosmopolitan theory and new ​communitarian theory (the phrase comes
from Emmanuel Adler’s 2005 collection) is working to transcend the divisions between
empirical and sociological (including critical) IR and normative IPT, and in doing so,
is bringing IPT to bear on the core questions of international law, diplomacy, and pub-
lic policy. Not all IPT has this focus; some forms of cosmopolitan thought in particular
value the critical distance that abstraction or ideal theory afford the normative theor-
ist. But the real potential lies in the emergent debates between cosmopolitans and com-
munitarians engaged with normative challenges thrown up by the international legal
order. In general terms the debate between cosmopolitans and communitarians has
lessened. This is partly because some communitarians have rebranded as weak cosmo-
politans, but also because the distance between the traditions has widened, with analytic
political theorists pursuing moral philosophical arguments between themselves and
constructivists and historicists pursuing social-​theoretic arguments in the pages of a
distinct literature. But the big ideas that provide the basis for a critical understanding of
the normative still matter, even if the fact that the core division between contemporary
cosmopolitans and communitarians is not really about the moral equality of humans
has drawn some of the sting from the early debates. As Risse notes, “we have learned the
basic cosmopolitan lesson: moral equality is an essential part of any credible theory of
global justice” (2012: 10; see also Brock and Brighouse 2005: 3). What is key, however, is
the distinctive ways in which these scholars reason about the normative and particularly
about the relationship between the moral and political.
 Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism    37

This chapter draws attention to the ways that some cosmopolitan theory and some
varieties of non-​cosmopolitanism, having learned from the critique of the cosmo-
politan/​communitarian distinction and having matured as a sub-​discipline, are re-​
engaging with the fundamental institutions of global politics and asking the critical
and praxeological questions that make ethical enquiry relevant to the world (Linklater
1998). There is a symmetry here in that IPT, once so keen to push past what Wight once
pointed to as IR theory—​the historical interpretation of law and diplomacy—​in a bid to
assert the centrality of normative enquiry is now returning to these fundamental sites
of international political practice in order to realize the potential of the field. In order to
explore these claims, this chapter examines the institutional or practical turn in the work
of key cosmopolitans such as Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan. Their work shows the
development of cosmopolitanism from the early critique of the work of scholars such
as John Rawls and Michael Walzer to the institutionally and legally focused work that
enables them to address, in moral and political terms, vital socio-​normative questions
from secession to environmental or humanitarian protection. Thereafter the chapter
explores the work of scholars who, despite acknowledging the normative force of uni-
versal and global moral claims, do not identify with cosmopolitanism as a theoretical
tradition. This group, which includes scholars such as Christian Reus-​Smit and Andrew
Hurrell, is influenced by English School and constructivist scholarship, and stresses the
need to consider the normative and sociological context in which norms operate in a
highly legalized world order.
There is no strong binary division between the political positions of cosmopolitans
and communitarians here. It could be argued that there never really was, and that
focus on the opposition between cosmopolitans and communitarians was a distrac-
tion. Nevertheless, at moments of great political crisis the theoretical approaches that
underlie normative claims really matter. Even if, as Buchanan has recently argued, “ideal
theory’s principles can be satisfied or at least seriously approximated through a process
that begins with the institutions and culture that we now have” (Buchanan and Keohane
2004: 28), we still need to understand the implications and structure of communitarian
and cosmopolitan moral arguments in order to make clear and well-​reasoned ethical
judgements.

Part 1

The first claim is not simply an attempt to resurrect the terminology of the cosmo-
politan/​communitarian distinction, but an argument that different terminology still
references the same broadly drawn but central features of normative debate in IPT.
Cosmopolitanism certainly has a clearly defined place in the literature. The critical
response of liberal cosmopolitans to Rawls’s Law of Peoples, and the establishment of
the then quite radical proposition that moral concern for individuals ought to tran-
scend geopolitical space (particularly the bonds of citizenship) and generational time
38   Peter Sutch

(see e.g. Pogge 1994; Beitz 2000; Buchanan 2000), established the tradition at the heart
of contemporary IPT. It is easy, from the vantage point of 2016, to underestimate the
resistance to the ways in which cosmopolitanism insisted on the existence of universal
moral principles and the ways in which such principles ought to feed into global polit-
ics. The Rawlsian assumption that IPT should focus on a society of peoples founded on
a shared history of international law, as developed after the Second World War (Rawls
1993; 1999), may have put the question of international justice back on the agenda for
Anglo-​American analytic political thought, but it reinforced the statism of the realist
and pluralist traditions in IR. The trajectory of the work of the early critics of Rawls’s
work to their current contributions to the debates tells its own story about the rise and
rise of cosmopolitanism. This is true in two ways. First, the initial work criticized Rawls
for not seeing the international implications of the moral egalitarianism that was at the
heart of liberal political theory (e.g. Pogge 1994; Buchanan 2000). The successes of these
arguments were such that Michael Blake’s claim, “We are all cosmopolitans now,” is
entirely credible (Blake 2013). Few who fail to identify with cosmopolitan political the-
ory would deny the central tenets of cosmopolitan thought. The commitment to a moral
conception of the equal worth of human beings and new understandings of the multiple
ways in which human beings are connected with each other and with future generations
mean that Pogge’s famous description of the basic elements of cosmopolitanism is now
applicable to almost all normative IPT (Pogge 2002: 169). Blake argues that this makes
the term overdue for retirement—​it is a frame that did important work when moral
egalitarianism was disputed but cannot help when the arguments have moved on (Blake
2013: 52; see also Risse 2012: 17). This point is important but, while bearing in mind the
earlier injunction to be aware that the categories we employ to simplify our field cannot
bear too much weight, there are at least two reasons to continue to employ the term as
part of an attempt to survey the field. First, the term is a key part of the self-​description of
a significant section of the field. Cosmopolitanism is, without doubt, the major tradition
to emerge from the early debate, and the centrality of cosmopolitanism can blind us to
its radical and critical nature, which still needs to be defended and elaborated. Secondly,
it is still important to distinguish between the ways that cosmopolitan IPT thinks about
moral egalitarianism and the very different ways that non-​cosmopolitan traditions do
so. The cosmopolitan tradition has become much more able to engage with the inher-
ent statism of international law and institutions, and more tolerant of the nuances of
ethical theories that have a place for the state and the international more broadly. This
moral confidence has led key scholars including Pogge and, more recently and more
completely, Buchanan, Beitz, and Risse to focus on the institutional and practical impli-
cations of cosmopolitan and non-​cosmopolitan “grounds of justice” (Risse 2012: 16–​17)
that exist side by side in the global order. The headline here is that the cosmopolitan
voice can now be heard as a key interlocutor in legal and policy debate. Rather than
attacking the foundations of an international order that failed to take distributive just-
ice, environmental justice, and human rights seriously as a basis for political action, the
implications of cosmopolitan ethics on immigration, trade law, secession, environmen-
tal governance, and humanitarian action are now the everyday subjects of cosmopolitan
 Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism    39

IPT (see Chapters 39 and 40). Such confidence is best expressed, I will argue below, in
the practical turn in the recent work of Buchanan and Beitz. Here, the question of how
moral theory can engage with the fragmented and often institutionally compromised
global legal order is at the centre of debate, and it is an engagement born of confidence
rather than compromise.
Communitarianism, on the other hand, has had rather different fortunes. The term
was often used pejoratively to imply a denial of universal or global moral norms, and
to link non-​cosmopolitan scholarship with parochialism and realism. In part, the
dynamics noted above led early cosmopolitan theorists to overstate the flaws in non-​
cosmopolitan work. Michael Walzer’s work was the clearest example of this phenom-
enon. Walzer’s communitarian position was portrayed as both conservative and statist.
His critique of the amoralism of realism and his elucidation of universal moral and legal
rules notwithstanding, Walzer’s argument for limited humanitarian warfare, respect
(born of solidarity and awareness of the dangers of domination) for cultural difference,
and respect for the ways in which the state protected the ways of life created by humans
(Walzer 2006; 1994: 16; 1990: 23) came in for strident criticism. Walzer’s self-​description
of his project as the desire “to take my place among the universalists [ . . . ] to explain the
appeal of moral particularism” (1990: 509) was barely heard in the early debates. It is tell-
ing that a symposium in Ethics & International Affairs (Beitz 2009; Doyle 2009; Kymlica
2009) that revisits the debates in Philosophy & Public Affairs between Walzer and his crit-
ics (Beitz 1980; Doppelt 1980; Luban 1980; Walzer 1980) puts much more emphasis on
the implicit internationalism of Walzer’s work (Beitz 2009: 325). In part this is due to the
new confidence in cosmopolitan theory in engaging with the centrality of states in law
and politics. It also has to do with the broader acceptance by those outside the cosmo-
politan tradition of the range of global injustices, and the moral resources at hand to help
critically approach those injustices. Nevertheless, the early debates effectively neutered
the viability of the term as it became associated with a conservative agenda in IPT.
The reason this chapter argues for the preservation of the term draws on work in
another subfield of IR theory. In 2005 Adler published a collection of essays entitled
Communitarian International Relations in which he develops a constructivist account
of the “communities of practice” that transform ideas into social practices. In the intro-
ductory essay he makes two moves that point us to a body of scholarship that has the
potential to be a vital interlocutor with cosmopolitanism in the more practice-​oriented
debates that characterize some of the most interesting developments in IPT. First, Adler
contrasts normative and constructivist communitarianism. For Adler, the flaws of nor-
mative IPT include foundational accounts of the priority of community interests over
individual interests and the priority of the good over the right. Constructivist commu-
nitarianism, or “new communitarianism” as he terms it, is more explicit about the role
of power in international politics and concerned with constitutive mechanisms of com-
munity such as “narrative, discourse and practice” that can link theory with practice
(Adler 2005: 13–​14). He is also clear that the new communitarian account of commu-
nities of practice “cuts across state boundaries and mediate between states, individu-
als and human agency, one one hand, and social structures and systems on the other”
40   Peter Sutch

(p. 15). His approach has helped link theorists of international society/​community with
other debates in empirical and sociological IR. While Adler is clear that new commu-
nitarianism has not provided a real engagement with the core normative question that
has held the attention of IPT—​“whether the construction of governance institutions and
practices should aim, as Hedley Bull argued, at maintaining international order or, as
Beitz held, at achieving global justice” (p. 13)—​more recent work by scholars includ-
ing constructivists such as Richard Price and political theorists such as Reus-​Smit has
addressed this lacuna, bringing communitarianism back into dialogue with IPT on key
questions of the justice of international practices.
If it were the case that all cosmopolitans were universalist and all communitarians
statist, the distinction would have been less problematic; but most communitarians
argue in favour of at least some global moral obligations, and most cosmopolitans rec-
ognize at least some special obligations among fellow-​citizens and/​or between mem-
bers of religious, ethnic, or cultural groups. Yet even taking this into account the debate
remains focused on “the moral value to be credited to particularistic collectivities as
against humanity as a whole or the claims of individual human beings” (Brown 1992: 12).
The main “flaw” that Brown saw in the distinction, that “too many writers who seem to
be in one camp cross over to the other at crucial points” (p. 17), is not a flaw in the dis-
tinction itself but a flaw in the way scholars viewed cosmopolitanism and communitar-
ianism as mutually exclusive. Moral reasons for valuing human beings as human beings
and moral reasons for valuing social and political communities are not always theoret-
ically incompatible, but there is something important about the ways in which we assign
moral priority to the global or the local when making policy recommendations. At issue
between cosmopolitans and communitarians were the ways in which universal moral
principles arise and become normative for actors in the world. Communitarians tended
to draw on more historicist and phenomenological traditions of moral philosophy, and
it is this that is represented in contemporary or new communitarian thought. As with
the contemporary cosmopolitans, much of the focus is now on how global moral prin-
ciples manifest on the international plane. It is here, in the theoretical and empirical
work in the social constructivist and English School traditions, that the distinction is
and remains useful. Replacing the terms with “pluralist” or “solidarist” or with “inter-
nationalist” or “globalist” does not really change this, and to ignore this central chal-
lenge is to ignore a core dynamic of IPT.
Even if the terms themselves are at least minimally plausible, much of the criticism of
the distinction focused on deeper concerns. The cosmopolitan communitarian debate
was critiqued as being too limited a basis for normative reflection on IR. The purpose of
the initial presentation of the distinction was to provide an intellectual starting point for
thinking about questions of international and global justice. In the postwar struggle to
banish utopianism from the science of IR, moral theory, and the classical canon of pol-
itical theory that was the historical core of normative social and political thought, was
excised from the discipline either because it was hopelessly idealistic or because it was
thought to be a fitting subject for (domestic) political rather than international reflec-
tion. The project outlined in International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches
 Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism    41

(Brown 1992) and in other works such as Janna Thompson’s Justice and World Order: A
Philosophical Inquiry (1992) or Andrew Linklater’s earlier Men and Citizens in the
Theory of International Relations (1982), which came out in second edition in 1990 as the
debate took form, was to re-​establish the relevance of political theory (particularly in
the Western Anglo-​American and European traditions) to IR as field of study. The initial
claim that the history of political thought was also, contra Wight (Wight 1966; see Brown
1992: 4–​8; Linklater 1990: 4–​5; Boucher 1998: 8), the classical resource for IPT had rather
divergent receptions. On the one hand it opened up the field to “a powerful and neg-
lected literature” (Smith 1992). On the other, in appealing to the classic Western canon
it was accused of reinforcing the distinction between empirical and normative IR. This
latter critique has several relevant variants, all of which focus on the relation between
politics and ethics. Communitarians, critical theorists, feminists, postcolonial theor-
ists and post-​structuralists challenged the ways in which IPT treated “ethics as a poten-
tial ‘doctor’ for IR, a body of principles that can imported from outside, once they are
finally agreed” (Walker 1993: 50, cited in Brasset and Bulley 2007: 1, emphasis original;
see Chapter 42). For these scholars, the problematic philosophical foundations of ethics
as presented in the classical canon obscured the deeply political nature of moral claims
in global affairs. There are more or less radical versions of this critique. For the post-​
structuralists, reliance on moral foundations that are “always-​already political,” and
the intellectual certainty that such principles are free of the taint of politics, inevitably
“enacts a violence towards alternative possible futures” (Brasset and Bulley 2007: 2), and
the project becomes a sustained critique of the ways these violences manifest. Without
embracing the full extent of the critique offered by post-​structuralist theorists such as
Kim Hutchings and Chris Reus-​Smit, both express concerns at the ways that the cosmo-
politan/​communitarian distinction tends to isolate IPT from IR, and thus the normative
from the empirical.
When IR scholars place normative enquiry in a separate scholarly universe—​in the
realm of political theory or philosophy—​they are working with this narrow concep-
tion of what constitutes ethical reasoning. And because students of international eth-
ics have themselves internalized this understanding, they too contribute to the ongoing
bifurcation of studies of international relations. Profound differences separate stu-
dents of international ethics, fuelling debates between cosmopolitans and communi-
tarians, deontologists and consequentialists, and Kantians, Grotians, and Hobbesians.
But underneath these differences lies an unstated consensus as to the narrowly defined
nature of ethical reasoning; and this unstated yet powerful consensus reinforces the div-
ide between scientists and ethicists, but this time from the other direction (Reus-​Smit
2008: 65–​6; Hutchings 1999: 30)
The way IPT often conceives of the normative, its moral foundationalism, its reliance
on the classical Western canon, pushes all IPT away from the critical and praxeological
projects of IR. Yet, fuelled by the positive reception of the core idea that morality mat-
ters and that individual moral wellbeing matters whether we are thinking about life in a
state, a shared transnational context (such as the economy or the environment), or just
as human moral agents, several pioneering scholars have taken the plunge and sought
42   Peter Sutch

to open up normative thinking to the political. The watchword of this development is

“moral accessibilty,” the attempt to gain some critical purchase for ethical reasoning by
consciously situating ethical reasoning in the political and institutional context of glo-
bal affairs. In this enterprise, scholars in the neo-​Kantian liberal tradition often associ-
ated with cosmopolitanism and scholars in more historicist traditions are moving from
different directions towards a similar goal—​morally accessible, institutionalized moral
reasoning.

Part 2

Cosmopolitans and communitarians have different reasons for seeking moral accessi-
bility. For the latter, doubts about the fact/​value distinction and a critical or interpret-
ive concern for the ways that politics informs ethics pushes theorists to consider the
ways that moral reasons manifest in social and political contexts (Hurrell 2002: 139–​42).
For the former, a recognition that global institutions embody at least some universal
principles designed to promote the equal moral worth of all humans has prompted an
engagement with the institutional and brought with it a sense that such an engagement
changes the nature of the theoretical enterprise. These intellectual patterns once again
bring cosmopolitans and communitarians into debate—​this time over what institu-
tional moral reasoning is and what moral prescriptions flow from it. The key claim here
is that once again we are finding fruitful ground for a renewed debate between the two
camps, and one that is of significance to an intellectual constituency beyond political
theory.
It is unsurprising that communitarianism might find an ally in constructivist IR the-
ory. A focus on the creation and evolution of communities that create meaning, and
on the co-​constitutive ways in which ideas, norms, and institutions develop, is the nat-
ural extension of the tradition. Indeed, the broad historical claims about the evolution
of international society and the ways that communities mediate morality found in the
work of communitarians, the English School, and in that of constitutive theorists such
as Mervyn Frost gains much from the empirical and sociological research programmes
of the constructivist approach. Richard Price notes that “much constructivist work was
itself a response to scepticism that moral norms matter in world politics” (Price 2008: 3).
But an understanding of the relationship between the empirical revelation that moral
norms do matter and the question that critical and normative political theorists want
to ask is a vital project still under development. The new communitarians (and here the
description casts off the imprimatur of Adler) pursue moral accessibility through

locating stable, public and shared vocabularies of justice that can serve as a medium
for argumentative exchange across the world as a whole and not simply within the
confines of the Western world, or the still more limited confines of liberal political
theory [ . . . ] the core focus, then, should be on the idea of a moral community, not
 Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism    43

as posited, or imagined, or argued for by human reason alone, but as reflected in the
shared practices, shared understandings and broader moral consciousness of inter-
national and global society. (Hurrell 2007: 303)

We need to bear in mind that what we are seeking access to is a site of moral debate. It is
not possible to read off the answer to the question “What ought we to do in context x?”
by simply describing context x. Nor can communitarians avail themselves of the empir-
ical findings of the constructivists and then simply apply existing moral theories found
in IPT. As Price argues, “normative theory and ethical prescriptions cannot completely
eschew their own empirical assumptions even as they rarely develop them as thoroughly
as has constructivism” (Price 2008: 7). At the same time, empirical accounts of the nor-
mative cannot and ought not to eschew normative theorizing. The praxeological ques-
tion that animates this work is simply “How should we act?” and, as Reus-​Smit argues,
this question necessarily brings empirical inquiry into dialogue with normative theory.

Pure empirical analysis or positive theory can never, in and of itself, tell us how we
should act, as it can never tell us our purposes. And purely normative, philosoph-
ical enquiry can tell us nothing about the parameters of action, about the constraints
and opportunities provided by the context—​material and non-​material—​in which
we seek to act. The purely empirical is as mythological and naive as the purely philo-
sophical. (Reus-​Smit 2008: 57)

The key challenge of this new communitarianism is to elaborate the relationship between
the empirical and the normative, and to show how that helps us answer the praxeologi-
cal question. One example of how this might be done can be seen in Reus-​Smit’s argu-
ment about the “interstitial” structure or “holistic” nature of ethical reasoning, and how
practices discipline normative arguments (Reus-​Smit 2004: 24–​38; 2008: 74–​9).
Cosmopolitans, by contrast, appear to have less natural affinity with practice-​based
approaches to normative reasoning. Yet much early work recognized the important
ways in which the development of (for example) human rights institutions provides
the basis for individualized moral claim rights that serve to restrict the rights of states
in their dealings with those in their jurisdiction and, more tentatively, generate obliga-
tions to those whose state cannot provide appropriate fulfilment of those rights. This
enabled some scholars to pursue a cosmopolitan agenda on the basis of an apparent con-
sensus already reached in practice. Thomas Pogge’s unpacking of the moral and prac-
tical consequences of taking Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR) seriously provides a powerful case (Pogge 2002; 2007). In this case the institu-
tional implications of the UDHR stood in as little more than a proxy for the moral argu-
ment that underpinned Pogge’s cosmopolitanism. More recently, however, Buchanan
and Beitz have gone much further, seeking to engage more completely with practices. In
doing so they recognize both the advantages and compromises entailed in such an enter-
prise (Buchanan 2004; 2010; Beitz 2010). The practical turn in liberal IPT (if indeed it is
developed enough to be so called) recognizes that if we are to take practices seriously we
44   Peter Sutch

have to permit the practice some authority in the argument we present. Institutions mat-
ter. Norms require institutionalization in order to be effective and so, at the very least,
we need to be cognizant of the effects institutionalization will have. Equally importantly,
we must realize that it is the practices themselves, rather than philosophical arguments
about practices, that are normative for actors.
Buchanan’s recent work develops arguments about the vital role of institutional moral
reasoning in IPT. Studying the practices of international human rights law (or, in the
earlier work, of international law more generally) is to study the “universally access-
ible authoritative version of the global lingua franca” (Buchanan 2013: 7). Studying these
institutionalized practices and ideas also enables us to focus on the question of the feasi-
bility (in practical and moral terms) of getting from where we are to where we want
to go (Buchanan 2004: 18–​22). Buchanan makes clear that “international legal human
rights are not the legal embodiment of a subset of moral human rights. Rather, they are
what they are: legal rights; and legal rights need not be the embodiment of corresponding
moral rights. Nor need legal rights be justified by appealing to moral rights. Legal rights, as
instrumental human creations, can serve a number of different purposes and can be jus-
tified by appeal to a number of different kinds of moral considerations” (Buchanan 2013:
11, emphasis original). In the earlier work he describes his project as developing a moral
theory of international law. The practice has rules that make the lingua franca intelli-
gible to and legitimate in the eyes of actors. Buchanan, drawing on Samantha Besson,
argues that the law

is an institutionalized form of practical reasoning that serves moral values while at

the same time managing moral disagreement by constraining the types of reasons
and evidence it admits as relevant. (Buchanan 2013: 8)

Buchanan is not renouncing his moral philosophy (which he describes a natural “duty
of justice” argument) but, in turning to practices, he is limiting its role in the recog-
nition that “institutionalized public normative reasoning plays an ineliminable role”
(Buchanan and Keohane 2004: 5–​6). Beitz pushes in the same direction. His practical
approach “aims to exploit the observation that the human rights enterprise is a global
practice” (Beitz 2010: 8). In doing so, he argues that as political theorists we are obliged
to allow the practice some authority in our thinking.

the practice exists: it is elaborate both doctrinally and politically, it consumes a con-
siderable amount of human and other resources, and people tend to regard its norms
with great seriousness. If the focus of critical interest is the idea of human rights as it
exists in public reflection and argument about global political life, then it seems self-​
evident that we should take instruction from public practice in conceptualizing its
central terms. (Beitz 2010: 11)

Both scholars are intent on exploring the justice of the existing normative order. They
clearly have some normative commitments that we would describe as cosmopolitan, but
 Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism    45

they are subjecting them to the authority of the practice in order to gain access to the
global lingua franca. It is here that we can see the re-​emergence of a more mature, insti-
tutionally nuanced debate.

Conclusion

The potential to bring moral debate to the centre of debates about institutions, legal
reform, and power by opening IPT to conversation with other scholarly traditions in IR
and beyond is immense. Here the strengths of critical and sociological IR theory, of legal
scholarship, and of IPT re-​engage in a conversation that situates ethical reflection as a
part of politics rather than as something outside it. The cosmopolitan communitarian
debate on the relationship between ethics and politics, the normative, and the empir-
ical is a significant part of this development, but the whole thrust of the practical turn
is the recognition that moral theory alone does not have the answers to our real-​world
dilemmas. It is worth remembering that the cosmopolitan/​communitarian distinction
was intended as a textbook introduction to ethical issues in IR, and it is a distinction
that most textbooks have struggled to transcend. Good textbooks capture the essence of
disciplinary evolution, speaking both to what is happening in the best scholarship and
to what the next stage of scholarly debate should be. The volumes that established and
developed the cosmopolitan/​communitarian distinction did just that, and provoked
important work by scholars in IPT. Whether IPT sustains or abandons the terminology,
it is clear that the core ideas are still relevant, and that opening out that conversation
to learn from other traditions of scholarship is vital. It is significant then that Anthony
Lang’s recent introduction to IPT finds four stands of IPT in political theory—​IR theory,
international legal theory, and moral and ethical philosophy—​noting that while most
scholars in these strands do not see themselves as contributing to IPT, we should ignore
sub-​disciplinary boundaries and work with all who engage with issues of normativity at
the international level (Lang 2015: 8). This thought will influence the scholarship of stu-
dents who read the book, and who are taught that IPT is a vital part of IR more broadly,
and of scholars in empirical, legal, and philosophical disciplines for whom the subject
matter of IR—​the question what ought we to do in the face of global challenges—​is more
important than intellectual boundaries.

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 ­c hapter 4

In ternationa l Re l at i ons
a nd Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Chris Brown

The modern idea that International Relations Theory (IR Theory) could be, and should
be, distinguished from International Political Theory (IPT) would have been confusing
to most of the founders of the discipline or field of International Relations, and indeed to
their pre-​disciplinary forebears. Insofar as they recognized the terms at all, they would
have assumed them to be synonymous or, perhaps, that the latter, IPT, was simply a subset
of the former. Most of the founders believed that theorizing about international relations
ought to be explanatory, normative, and prescriptive, and would have resisted the idea
that one or more of varieties of theory should be privileged over the others, or isolated
from them. Now, however, things have changed. Since the 1980s the term “IR Theory”
has been mostly understood as designating explanatory theory, and as a result, IPT has
come to refer more specifically to normative and prescriptive theorizing. The purpose
of this chapter is to explain how this state of affairs came to be, and to criticize the think-
ing that lies behind such a division of labour. If IPT is to develop its engagement with
“real politics” and to provide fruitful avenues for empirical research, an artificial divide
between explanatory and normative theory cannot be allowed to persist—​the goal must
be to return to the more comprehensive account of theory espoused by the founders.

Before “International Relations” and

the Early History of the Discipline

Books on “International Relations” or “International Politics” begin to appear in the

quarter-​century before 1914, along with a small number of university courses similarly
 International Relations and IPT    49

titled, mostly in Political Science departments and almost exclusively in the United
States (Schmidt 1997)—​but the emergence of International Relations as an academic
discipline (or at least a separate field of study) is a product of the two World Wars.
The First World War and the formation of the League of Nations stimulated system-
atic study of international relations, centred around a number of research institutes
(e.g. the Council for Foreign Relations in New York and the (later Royal) Institute for
International Affairs, Chatham House, in London) and university chairs; the Second
World War, the United Nations, and the Cold War produced a reboot of the field and
substantial expansion. As a result, what we think of today as “International Relations”
is a product of the period from c.1918 to c.1955; but many of the ideas that it worked
with had been first proposed in the three centuries before 1914, before “International
Relations,” by a mix of lawyers, philosophers, and historians as well as political scientists
(see Chapter 2). Most of the individuals concerned—​a small sample of whose work will
next be examined—​did not think of themselves as International Relations theorists, but
together they laid the basis for the later study, and did so without clearly demarcating
separate roles for explanation, normative analysis, and prescription.
One obvious group of past thinkers who contributed to the new discipline comprises
theorists of Natural Law and the Law of Nations, thinkers who between the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries developed the notion that the emerging system of states in
Europe constituted a norm-​governed international society. Numerous individuals con-
tributed to this notion, from Vitoria in the sixteenth century, via Grotius and Pufendorf
in the seventeenth, to Emerich Vattel in the early eighteenth. The latter was in some
respects the least intellectually interesting of this galaxy of stars, yet his text The Law
of Nations or Principles of International Law (1758) gives the fullest account of the prin-
ciples of international society, and, crucially, is grounded not just in the principles of nat-
ural law, but also in the practices of international society (Brown, Nardin, and Rengger
2002). Accordingly, his account of the law of nations describes the condition of the
European states system, but it also explains how that condition is arrived at—​through
the operation of the balance of power—​and why the resultant international society is
normatively desirable. A stable balance of power allows independent, legally equal but
materially unequal states to maintain their liberty, which is a key aim of statecraft.
Maintaining independence in this way could sometimes involve war, and for that rea-
son Vattel and his colleagues were described as “sorry comforters” by Immanuel Kant,
the philosopher who at the end of the eighteenth century produced the most elaborate
and sophisticated account of the conditions of peace of his age. Kant’s primary goal in
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) was prescriptive—​his tract takes the form
of a “peace project,” a popular literary genre of the eighteenth century—​but his prescrip-
tions are firmly based in an account of how the current order worked and what would be
needed to change it (Kant 1983). Although Kant did not describe his work in the terms
of today’s social science, Michael Doyle was able to use his account of the precondi-
tions for a perpetual peace to produce a highly influential version of “democratic peace
theory,” the notion that stable democracies do not fight each other (Doyle 1983). Kant
would have been surprised, and rather shocked, by the idea that his desired “republican”
50   Chris Brown

states could be described as democratic, but would surely have approved of the idea that
explanatory theory and normative theory are inevitably intertwined.
Lawyers and philosophers approached international relations with a focus on norms
and values, with explanatory theory a necessary but secondary feature of their work;
proponents of raison d’état or realpolitik reversed this order, beginning with power and
its operation and then moving to normative prescription. Machiavelli is the paradigm
figure here, the inspiration for a clutch of Machiavellians (Meinecke 1924/​1997; 1962).
His handbook for rulers, The Prince (1532), is for the most part a work about the nuts
and bolts of power, how to achieve it, how to hang on to it, how to extend it (Machiavelli
1988). But even in this short work the final chapter (“Exhortation to Seize Italy and Free
Her from the Barbarians”) is clearly prescriptive, and in his longer work The Discourses
(1531) values and norms come to the fore—​this is a passionate defence of republican
principles (Machiavelli 1996). This combination of the explanatory and the normative
is common to later Machiavellians and “realists,” writers on the balance of power such
as Friedrich von Gentz, or theorists of the rational state such as G. F. W. Hegel (Brown,
Nardin, and Rengger 2002).
None of the writers discussed above would think of themselves as contributing to the
discipline of International Relations—​indeed, their writings precede the late nineteenth-
century subdivision of social thought into separate academic discourses—​but when,
after 1918, such a discipline emerged it took over the aspiration, common to its predeces-
sors, of creating theory that was normative as well as explanatory and that engaged with
the real politics of its era. The thinkers of the “twenty years’ crisis” were later accused by
realist thinkers of neglecting the explanatory and the engagement with real politics in
favour of utopian thinking, but an examination of their work refutes this characteriza-
tion (Long and Wilson 1995). Conversely, realist critics such as E. H. Carr and, a little
later, Hans J. Morgenthau were accused of neglecting the role of values and norms and
overemphasizing pure power politics, but again the charge does not stick. A closer read-
ing of Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939) makes it clear that, although he rightly criticized
“utopians” for substituting their hopes and fears for a rigorous analysis of the reality of
the politics of the 1930s, it was not his intention to exclude utopian thought altogether
from the study of world politics—​rather, he believed that an International Relations that
did not incorporate normative thinking would be sterile and impotent (Carr 2001 [1939];
Booth 1991). The most important British postwar realist, Martin Wight, took a similar
position; he was very clear that in titling his pamphlet/​book Power Politics he was not
endorsing a crude realpolitik but sketching the politics of the powers—​although in his
case the relationship between his own Christian pacifism and his normative prescrip-
tions was not as clear as one might have hoped (Wight 1978 [1946]; Bull 1976; Hall 2006).
Again, although Morgenthau believed that interest defined in terms of power was,
or should be, at the centre of the study of International Relations, he was very much
aware of the importance of the moral dimension of political life. Two of his famous “Six
Principles of Political Realism” concerned this dimension; the Fourth notes that pol-
itical realism is aware of the moral significance of political action, and accompanying
tensions between “moral command and the requirements of successful political action,”
 International Relations and IPT    51

while the Fifth insists that “Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a
particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe” (Morgenthau 1954). This
latter point is of particular interest in the context of the relationship between American
realists and US foreign policy over the last fifty years. In the 1960s Morgenthau was
a leading critic of America’s war in Vietnam, while in the 2000s, figures such as John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, using new social media, were very effective real-
ist critics of neo-​conservative thought on international relations (Morgenthau 1970;
Mearsheimer and Walt 2003).
To summarize the argument so far, the academic discipline of International Relations
which finally came to a kind of maturity in the 1950s and 1960s was committed to what
one might call a full-​spectrum approach to theorizing international relations. IR Theory
was expected to be explanatory and prescriptive, causal and normative. The main theory
of the post-​1945 world was, in broad terms, realist, informed and shaped by figures such
as Carr, Morgenthau, and Wight—​and, in France, Raymond Aron, in America, George
Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr—​but this was a version of realism that was unafraid to
address norms. And, in any event, there were other, non-​realist theories on offer, such
as that associated with the “world peace through world law” movement promoted by
Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, along with other UN-​oriented ideas (Clark and Sohn
1958). It would be a mistake to overstate the pluralism of the discipline of International
Relations in this period—​for example, the contribution of classical political theory to
an understanding of International Relations was seriously underplayed as the new dis-
cipline asserted the sui generis nature of its subject matter (Wight 1960)—​but at least the
separation of IPT from IR Theory, characteristic of a later period, was not a feature of the
1950s and 1960s. So, what happened?

The “Scientific Study of IR”

and the Marginalization of
Normative Theory

In the 1930s, Carr was clear that International Relations ought to be studied “scientif-
ically”; in the 1940s Morgenthau wrote of laws of politics, concerning, for example, the
balance of power, in such a way that a casual observer might imagine that he too aspired
to promoting the scientific study of international relations. So, indeed, he did—​but the
model of science that he and Carr adhered to was very different from that of the “natural
sciences.” In Anglo-​American usage the term “science” immediately conjures up the dis-
ciplines of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, whereas in Morgenthau’s native German the
nearest corresponding word is Wissenschaft, which does not have such connotations—​
Wissenschaft essentially designates systematic and rigorous study. Geisteswissenschaft
designates philosophy, history, and the social sciences, and there is no implication here
that these subjects are to be studied in the same way that one might study Physics or
52   Chris Brown

Chemistry. In one of his best books, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau expli-
citly confronts those who aspire to study the social sciences in the same way that the nat-
ural sciences are studied (Morgenthau 1947). Such an aspiration was, however, a feature
of what began as a minority movement within American Political Science in the 1940s
and 1950s and gradually came to achieve the status of an orthodoxy.
In International Relations the move towards the scientific study of the subject was
led by the comparatively large number of ex-​natural scientists who were attracted to
the field. These people were sometimes former physicists with a guilty conscience
over nuclear weapons, or systems analysts employed by bodies such as the RAND
Corporation to improve the quality of United States policy-​making in the area of
defence. They were joined by imports from the behavioural sciences, who were attuned
to a version of the social sciences that involved an attempt to study the actual behaviour
of actors rather than the meanings they assigned to this behaviour. The aim of these
“behaviouralists” (as the movement came to be called) was to replace what they called
the “wisdom literature” and “anecdotal” use of history represented by Morgenthau
and other traditional realists with rigorous, systematic scientific concepts and reason-
ing. There were various dimensions to this. It might involve casting old theories in new,
rigorous forms—​as with Morton Kaplan’s “balance of power” models (Kaplan 1957).
Or it might involve generating new historical databases and time-​series to replace the
alleged anecdotalism of traditional diplomatic history—​as in the “Correlates of War”
project directed by J. D. Singer and associates at Ann Arbor, Michigan (Singer et al.
1979), or the use of formal mathematical models for the study of decisions—​as in game-​
theoretic work and early rational choice theory in the hands of people such as Thomas
Schelling at Harvard (Schelling 1960).
For the purpose of this discussion, the key point about the movement to create what
its proponents saw as a genuine science of international politics was the way in which
normative and prescriptive work in the field was increasingly marginalized by the “sci-
entists.” Interestingly the aforementioned natural scientists were actually stimulated to
enter the field by normative considerations, and were resistant to this marginalization;
it was the behavioural scientists and, especially, economists who were more influential
in putting normative work to one side. A key figure here was the American monetarist
Milton Friedman, whose 1953 essay on “The Methodology of Positive Economics” was
enormously influential (Friedman 1966). Friedman draws on the distinction between
“is” and “ought” statements probably best set out by the Enlightenment philosopher
David Hume in the eighteenth century (Hume 1985). He distinguishes positive eco-
nomics, which he believes tells us how things actually are, from normative economics,
which purports to tell us how things should be. Thus, to take a famous example, the
Phillips Curve was an exercise in positive economics which attempted to explain the
relationship between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment in a society—​
essentially, lower unemployment was associated with higher inflation. If the curve is
accurately described, it should be possible to predict the level of employment associ-
ated with any particular inflation rate—​this is positive economics, but what it cannot tell
us is which particular combination of the two variables is desirable; that, according to
 International Relations and IPT    53

Friedman’s distinction, is a matter for normative economics. It is not something that can
be decided by a fact-​based calculation, because whatever combination is chosen there
will be winners and losers, and deciding whether to punish savers with high levels of
inflation or disadvantage job-​seekers with low levels of employment is a policy decision
that reflects values, not analysis.
On the face of it, the distinction between positive and normative theory seems sens-
ible, and has been adopted by some writers who describe themselves as normative
theorists (see Chapter 50). Still, this adoption is a tactical mistake, because although
according to Friedman both positive and normative theory are in principle seen as legit-
imate activities, for most social scientists nowadays the former is regarded as more ser-
ious, in a sense more real, than the latter. Majority opinion has come to think that “real”
theory is explanatory theory—​this is where the rigorous work is done, and normative
theory is a decidedly second-​rate activity. In any event, the distinction between the two
is not as clear cut as Friedman would have it. Friedman’s account of a positive social sci-
ence is clearly based on the model of the natural sciences, yet there are important ways
in which the natural and social sciences differ. In the natural sciences, non-​reflexivity
is the rule—​to put it crudely, the subject matter of a natural science theory is not con-
scious of the fact that its behaviour or nature is being theorized, and is not capable of
reflecting on the implications of this fact. Human beings are so capable; they can adapt
consciously in ways that the objects of natural science cannot. Neo-​positivist theorists
of international relations are, of course, conscious of this difficulty and do their best
to adapt their theories to take it into account, and with some success—​but it remains
the case that the distinction between normative and positive theory is always blurred.
Norms and values permeate human behaviour and the behaviour of states, and while it
is not necessary to go as far as those who argue that as a result all theory is normative, it
is clearly a mistake to think that there is a clear dividing line between the normative and
the positive (Frost 1996).
Mistaken as this belief may be, the aspiration to create positive theory has been very
influential in Political Science and in International Relations, especially in the United
States, which in quantitative terms (number of scholars, quantity of work produced)
is the home of the discipline. As an aside, in the UK, where International Relations
emerged not out of Political Science but out of Law, Philosophy, and History, there has
been greater resistance to the siren call of positivist social science, but even here the
trend is in that direction (Brown 2011). The drive to push the American social science of
International Relations in the direction of marginalizing normative considerations was
reinforced by the success of Kenneth Waltz’s 1979 book Theory of International Politics—​
somewhat ironically, because Waltz himself was by no means a positivist social scientist
(Waltz 1979; Booth 2011). Waltz’s book was instrumental in establishing the centrality
of economic reasoning, i.e. rational choice theorizing, neo-​utilitarianism, and analo-
gies from neoclassical economics, for the study of International Relations. Although he
described his work as “structural realism,” he is in fact offering a “rational choice” version
of the balance of power in which states are assumed to be self-​interested egoists existing
under anarchy, who can be treated as though they were determining their strategies by
54   Chris Brown

choosing that which maximizes their welfare. From this basic position can be derived a
distinction between “defensive realists” such as Stephen Van Evera, who look simply for
states to maintain their position within the system, and “offensive realists” such as John
Mearsheimer, who assume that states attempt to achieve as much power as possible, via
at least regional hegemony (Van Evera 1999; Mearsheimer 2001). Equally importantly,
some liberal thinkers accepted the two basic assumptions of international anarchy and
the rational egoism of states; the aim of their analysis was to show that it was possible for
rational egoists to cooperate even in an anarchical system, given a sufficiently high level
of institutionalization (Keohane 1984; Axelrod and Keohane 1985).
Structural Realism and Liberal Institutionalism have been the dominant IR theories
of the last thirty years, and each has achieved this position by abstracting the normative
and prescriptive dimensons from broader notions of realism and liberalism, dominant
in the interwar and immediate post-​1945 period. IR Theory came to be understood as
positive theory—​explanatory in nature. Norms were acknowledged by some as contrib-
uting to the causal account of the world that was sought, “accounting for a small part of
the variance,” as a causal theorist might put it, but normative analysis as such was given
secondary status. IR Theory’s loss, however, was to provide a stimulus to IPT.

Bringing Political Theory Back In

At the very point at which mainstream IR Theory was moving away from normative
analysis, for the first time in the post-​1945 world normative Political Theory was devel-
oping an interest in the international. The stimulus to this shift was the publication
in 1970 of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice; Rawls’s work was, by common consent, a
masterpiece, the most important work of Anglo-​American political theory of the cen-
tury, radical in its implications for social policy—​but it was also, in one respect, very
conservative (Rawls 1970). Rawls’s contract theory drew a sharp distinction between
justice in domestic society and international justice; domestic societies were assumed
to be self-​contained cooperative schemes for mutual advantage in which principles of
distributive justice were required—​no such cooperative society existed internationally,
so only the formal justice provided by international law was appropriate for relations
between states. Social justice operated at the domestic level only. From the outset this
position was regarded as unacceptable—​perverse even. The refusal to theorize inter-
national inequalities seemed wrong even (perhaps especially) to those who accepted
the basic model of justice proposed by Rawls, and soon writers who were, as it were,
more Rawlsian than Rawls himself were providing readings of international society that
made space for principles of redistribution and social justice. The most important of
these readings was Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations, which
appeared in 1979, coincidentally the same year as Waltz’s masterpiece (Beitz 1979).
There is no space here to go into all the ins and outs of post-​Rawlsian theories of inter-
national justice (on which see Brown 2006; 2015); the key point is that in the 1970s and
 International Relations and IPT    55

1980s political theorists began to focus on the international in a way that had not been
seen since the time of Kant and Hegel. Post-​Rawlsians were only part of this story, albeit
an important part. Alternative readings of international society were provided by Terry
Nardin, employing an Oakeshottian framework, and Mervyn Frost, whose “constitutive
theory” had Hegelian roots (Nardin 1983; Frost 1986). Perhaps of greater long-​run sig-
nificance was the revival of Just War theory in the aftermath of the Vietnam war; here
Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars is a landmark, the work that more than any other
took Just War thinking out of theological colleges and into the mainstream of political
theory (Walzer 2015). Walzer’s defence of political communities in that book, from a
perspective that owed much to John Stuart Mill, stimulated an engagement with more
cosmopolitan liberals such as Beitz and David Luban, usefully collected in Beitz’s edited
collection International Ethics (Beitz, Alexander, and Scanlon 1985). Here was the ori-
gin of the cosmopolitan/​communitarian debate in IPT (on which see Chapter 3 of this
Handbook). Add to this the fact that in the 1970s human rights attracted more inter-
est than they had for decades, partly as a result of their role in the East–​West détente
marked by the Helsinki Accords, partly because of the emergence of a non-​communist
discourse on economic rights (Moyn 2010; Shue 1980).
In summary, a discourse of IPT began to take shape in this period, not so much in
opposition to mainstream IR theory as in parallel to it. In many respects writers in the
post-​Rawlsian wing of the new discourse were similar in their methodological assump-
tions to the rational-​choice theorists who were taking over mainstream IR theory—​they
accepted the distinction between normative and positive theory and were content to
provide the former. But more significant was the fact that the new discourse provided
a home for many writers who would previously have been happy to think of themselves
as IR theorists but who now felt marginalized by structural realism and liberal insti-
tutionalism. The most obvious group who fell into this category are the students of
international society, who in 1981 were characterized by one of their fiercest critics as
the “English School,” a label they soon accepted as a badge of honour (Jones 1981). The
leading figure of the English School of the time, the Australian Hedley Bull, had in 1977
produced an account of what he called The Anarchical Society that would have been rec-
ognizable to a figure such as Morgenthau as congruent with his own theoretical work—​
but Bull was also a fierce critic of what he regarded as American scientism, and had little
time for the way the discipline was going in the United States (Bull 1966; 2012).
The relationship between English School writers and theorists of global justice
was by no means always easy. Charles Beitz had directed some of his most trenchant
criticisms of conventional IR theory in Political Theory and International Relations
at English School writers, and from the point of view of the post-​Rawlsians, John
Rawls himself added insult to injury by restating his views on the distinctive nature
of international society in a book that owed much to the English School—​The Law of
Peoples (Rawls 1999; Brown 2002). Still, even though English School writers and post-​
Rawlsians disagreed about many matters of substance, they at least agreed that what
they were disagreeing about was important. Thus, for example, most of the English
School were very sceptical about violations of the norm of non-​intervention for
56   Chris Brown

humanitarian reasons or to promote regime change (and were joined in this scepti-
cism by Michael Walzer), whereas most post-​Rawlsians regarded this norm as of lit-
tle importance, to be violated in the interests of universal values whenever it seemed
prudent to do so; but both camps agreed that intervention posed important normative
and moral questions—​questions which mainstream IR theory had become incapable
of posing let alone answering.
A second category of theorists who now found IPT to be more hospitable than IR
theory, overlapping somewhat with the English School, is made up of historians of inter-
national thought. In the 1950s and 1960s there was comparatively little work being done
on the history of international thought, and what there was was not of the highest quality;
Martin Wight’s description of communists and Nazis as the children of Kant and Hegel
is an extreme example of a dubious historical judgement from this period—​extreme but
not wholly uncharacteristic of the age (Wight 1960). By the 1980s, however, the quality
of work on the history of international thought had risen quite dramatically—​see for
example Andrew Linklater’s Men and Citizens (1982). Here Kant’s cosmopolitanism is
liberated from the charge of utopianism, Hegel’s account of the rational state is no longer
seen as a cover for German nationalism, and Marx’s thought is studied in its own terms
and not through Leninist lenses. But such work was little valued by mainstream IR the-
orists; as IR theory took over from Economics its conception of formal theory, and from
econometrics its quantitative techniques, so it also took over the lack of interest in its
own history that characterizes the modern discipline of Economics. If, as Waltz would
have it, the “anarchy problematic” has the same characteristics in all non-​hierarchical
international orders, that is those where the units that compose the system are differ-
entiated by capabilities not functions, then there is no advantage to the study of history
save perhaps the collection of anecdotes for heuristic purposes. The new discourse of
IPT at least provided a home for new high-​quality historical work.
Less easy to fit within the new discourse was the work of critical theorists, post-​
modernists, and feminists (see e.g. Cox 1981; Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Tickner
1992). It is difficult to generalize here, because these labels cover three very wide fields—​
some writers who self-​identify as feminists or critical theorists are certainly engaged in
IPT, as other chapters of this Handbook testify—​but the main emphasis of work in these
fields lies elsewhere, and this is almost exclusively the case for post-​modernist and post-​
structuralist work. The reason for mentioning their work in this context is that these
approaches have defined themselves in opposition to the IR mainstream in much the
same way as IPT has—​they are, if not companion, at least cognate discourses.

Conclusion

This chapter has traced the origins of the separation between IR Theory and IPT, ori-
gins that still influence the shape of these discourses, even though some of the sharper
edges of the distinction between them have been smoothed out. For example, the rise
 International Relations and IPT    57

of constructivist IR Theory, albeit still a minority discourse, has improved the status of
normative thinking within the mainstream, while internal critiques of theories of global
justice such as that of Thomas Nagel have challenged the readiness of some International
Political Theorists to disregard political realities (Nagel 2005). As the contents of this
Handbook illustrates, International Political Theorists are now engaged with “real pol-
itics” at a number of different levels, and via empirical research; as a result, and more or
less inevitably, the distinction between normative and positive theory, always dubious
in principle, becomes more difficult to sustain in practice. Perhaps the long-​term future
involves a return to the situation in the early years of the discipline when “International
Relations Theory” and “International Political Theory” were synonymous?

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 ­c hapter 5

Internationa l L aw
and Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Gerry Simpson

Why Is There International Thought?

Pupils of international law inevitably encounter, early in their study, a field-​defining

split between international law’s two most pervasive self-​images: as a field of norms
derived from the scientific (Kelsen 1934) or empirical (Simmons 2010) study of the prac-
tice of states, and as a project of reform or radical transformation grounded either in
aspirational humanitarianism (Weston, Falk, and D’Amato 1990) and normative theory
(McDougal, Lasswell, and Reisman 1968) or in assemblages of post-​Enlightenment crit-
ical thinking (Boyle 1985; Beckett 2012). In this chapter, I will consider historically law’s
receptiveness (and sometimes lack of receptiveness) to political theory (via Kant and
Hobbes and, later, Schmitt and Rawls) and consider too the way in which description,
prescription, and critique form a congeries of approaches that together, in turn, produce
an intellectual field that might be described as the political theory of international law
(though it is hardly one thing, and some of it refuses altogether the injunctions of trad-
itional political theory).
All of this will lead to a consideration of two particular problems of inter-
national diplomacy to which political theories of international law appear to have
responded: namely, intervention and war crimes trials, and then, finally, to an engage-
ment with two interdisciplinary turns through which international law has enlivened its
habits of thought and theoretical inclinations.
It is by now a commonplace that political theory has been largely associated with—​
indeed has dedicated itself to—​the study of state formation, authority, legitimacy, and
resilience as a matter of internal or domestic politics (Wight 1960).1 The question, from
Aristotle and Plato through to Hobbes and Bodin and then on to Rawls and Skinner,
 International Law and IPT    61

largely concerned how a good (Plato) or tolerable (Hobbes) life is to be constructed

within the polis.
This attention to the construction of sovereign space can be understood, then, as a
kind of inattention to that other sphere in which political life is conducted—​namely, the
sphere of the international or the space in which sovereigns and others engage with each
other beyond the boundaries of the provincial or local or sovereign. Indeed, that space
itself, and therefore what counts as local or global, has been partly defined by the sorts
of choices and intellectual commitments made by both the political and philosophical
classes (Eslava 2016). This is why the Scottish nineteenth-​century international lawyer
James Lorimer felt free to assert the proposition that no man of first-​class intellectual
abilities had ever devoted himself to the study of the law of nations (Lorimer 1883; Knop
2016), why Martin Wight was able to ask “Why is there no international theory?” (1960),
and why David Armitage, as recently as 2013 and in direct homage to Skinner’s earlier
Foundations of Political Thought, could devote a book to retrieving the foundations of
modern international thought (Armitage 2013: 1–​13).
Two separate arguments are being made here about international political theory.
One arises from a sense that philosophers of the international were somehow medi-
ocre or scatter-​brained or unsystematic or parasitic or engaged in what Kenneth Waltz
described mordantly as “the puerile task of telling men of affairs to stop behaving
badly” (Waltz 1962: 331). The other is a converse belief that when the great philosophers
studied the world of sovereigns they tended to produce second-​class or derivative
work. Richness of thought and revolutionary originality (political theory in the polis)
is replaced by tired formulas and shallow diagnosis (political theory among states).
According to this view, political theorists have turned to the international space either
in a state of late-​career exhaustion or torpor (The Law of Peoples after A Theory of Justice)
or before they have produced more foundational work (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
before Spheres of Justice) or as a coda to brilliant lifelong interrogations of the constitu-
tional life of the state (Dworkin 2013). To interrogate the international is either to take a
break from the central work of figuring out how a state is meant to manage its internal
affairs or to indulge a hobby or sideline.
This image of the field requires significant revision in light of several developments
including: the turn to international history in historical studies in general (Mazower
2012) and in intellectual history in particular (Moyn and Sartori 2013); the sense that
political theories—​if they are to have any purchase—​need to confront the condi-
tions of global life; and the (re)turn to theory in the work of international lawyers
themselves. All of this has produced important work but also opportunities for inter-
disciplinary cross-​fertilization. An important aspect of this work has been the reinter-
pretation of political thought as international. Here, the likes of Hobbes, Hume, Arendt,
and Foucault (Dyzenhaus 2014; Gillroy 2007; Golder 2015; Whitehall 2016; Roele
2012) have been revived or reconfigured as theorists of international politics and law.
At the same time, Suarez, Vitoria, and Grotius have been reread as political theorists
engaged in internal politics and polemic contestation (Hunter 2010). So perhaps, at
least, we can say that Wight’s goal to overcome “the unhappy partition that had divided
62   Gerry Simpson

philosophically minded international lawyers and internationally minded political

philosophers” (Lawson 2012: 31) has been achieved.
But why did this state of affairs arise in the first place? Interestingly, the problem of
political theory’s domesticity is mirrored by the obstacles international law has encoun-
tered in having itself regarded as law “properly so-​called” (Austin 1954; Bentham, 1789).
If—​and to return to Wight—​the international space is indeed a realm of “repetition and
recurrence,” where a set of unchanging iron laws of history dictate what is possible or,
more pertinently, impossible (Wight 1960), it would make sense for political theorists to
devote attention to normative projects related to the internal workings of the state and
descriptive projects concerning the endlessly variable machinations of political agents
within the state. To put this aphoristically, national sovereign space becomes the sphere
of political theory, while the international is the sphere of (mere) history and necessity.
The political theory of international law suffers from the obvious problem that, from a
certain angle, the international order is incapable of being understood as either juridical
(laws between nations in an anarchical system?) or political (politics among nations in a
world of survival, insecurity, and war?).
In the rest of this chapter, I want to offer a tentative (and positive) response to these
concerns by arguing that there is a lively and substantial political theory of international
law constituted by what political philosophers have said about international law and by
what international lawyers have said about themselves (or their field), and that this pol-
itical theory has had two separate tendencies. In the first, the classical political theory of
international law is a set of reflections (often quite disparate) about the possibilities of a
life among sovereign states in a space we think of as international or anarchical. In the
second mode (let’s call it “the modern conception”), the international feels more like some
national political spaces: a polity in which there is a quite thick and lawful order. The sub-
jects (or “legal persons”) within this legal order are much more diverse and diffuse than in
the classical conception of international law (Krisch 2010). In this second mode, political
theory either becomes a normative project that seeks (in its most sophisticated version)
to advance a framework of norms and institutions designed to govern this world fairly
or efficiently or democratically in the presence of the interpenetration of local and inter-
national space and the profusion and multiplicity of legal regimes, and law-​bearing and
receiving actors within this space (Young 2012), or becomes a critical project that thinks of
international law as a language or space or terrain in which our political, cultural, and eth-
ical lives are articulated and contested: a law, not above the political realm taming or man-
aging it, but imbricated within it (Koskenniemi 1989; Cass 1996; Shklar 1964) and helping
to constitute what counts as law and non-​law in the first and last place (Johns 2012).

Classical International Law: Anarchy

and Cooperation

The Hobbesian image of autonomous, sometimes nasty, alienated agents weighed

heavily on classical international lawyers, who developed various species of positivism
 International Law and IPT    63

to accommodate or (partially) counteract it. International legal positivists were

responding to the assumptions of anarchy that provoked generations of international
relations realists, but their idealized sovereigns were not violent and insecure but
instead capable of engaging in limited cooperation defined by legal rules to which
they themselves had agreed. The eighteenth-​century Swiss lawyer Emmerich Vattel
brought this inter-​sovereign order into relief with his focus on agreement, self-​help,
self-​defence, and auto-​interpretation, and this idea of an international order com-
posed of self-​constraining sovereigns and horizontal legal agreement was very influ-
ential on nineteenth-​century international lawyers (Holland 1898; Westlake 1894) as
well as late twentieth-​century international society thinkers. Legal positivism, for all
its updatings (Weil 1983; d’Aspremont 2011; and judicial re-​elaborations (The Lotus
Case)) has remained tied to this idea of law as a kind of anti-​normative (or, better,
norm-​generating) description of what states do and what they believe and what they
feel obliged to do in future.

Modern International Law

I: Normativity and Centralization

What, then, is the modern political theory of international law? From within the dis-
cipline, two main approaches can be discerned: a progressive-​humanitarian orthodoxy
that has tried to conceptualize international law as a combination of social contract
(Rawls 1996) and moral norm or communitarian value (Tasioulas 1996), and a more dis-
illusioned, heterodox tradition that either tends to read international law as philosoph-
ically unstable (Koskenniemi 1989) or historically culpable (Craven 2007) or politically
(Beckett 2012) and economically (Lang 2011; Pahuja 2011) complicit or excessively pro-
gressivist (Skouteris 2010), or seeks to understand international law as a way of thinking
embedded in particular cultural formations (Berman 2011; Simpson 2015).
To begin with the first of these, international law has always possessed an explicitly
normative aspect. This political theory of international law is often traced back to the
early international lawyers who adopted forms of naturalism that gelled nicely with
moral prescription. In Vitoria, for example, a Christian ethic underpins both a commit-
ment to charity or equality but also various forms of violent evangelical empire. It was,
of course, Immanuel Kant who offered up the most famous and explicitly normative
international law in his Articles on Perpetual Peace. This work greatly absorbed inter-
national relations theory after Michael Doyle’s revival of Kant via the democratic peace,
and international lawyers continue to rely on and contest (Koskenniemi 2012; Howse
and Teitel 2013) Kant. A recent effort to bring some of these tendencies together and to
weld them to a normative and institutional thickening in the human rights and inter-
national criminal law fields is found in the recent work of Ruti Teitel (2016). She has
argued for a “humanity’s law” in which certain moral prohibitions have become uni-
versalized and concretized in institutions like the International Criminal Court or in
norms like the prohibition on “crimes against humanity.”
64   Gerry Simpson

Of course, there are many different stripes of liberal theory in international law and
at least two apparently opposed liberal projects at the heart of the discipline: one apply-
ing liberal normativism to international law, the other accentuating the cooperative,
agnostic face of liberal thought. An important, if flawed, attempt to bring these under
some sort of philosophical structure is found in the work of John Rawls. Rawls has been
widely regarded as the pre-​eminent liberal scholar of his generation, and yet his major
works (Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism) each contained only the odd aside about
global politics. Initially, a Rawlsian international law consisted either in cataloguing
these asides or in imaginative reconstructions of his central claims as international law
(Franck 1989).
When Rawls himself came to international law, the results were decidedly mixed. The
Law of Peoples applies one of the boldest contemporary restatements of liberal theory to
international law, but the combination yields a rather banal set of principles (many of
which are found in the UN Charter already) as well as a tripartite distinction (between
outlaw states, decent but illiberal states, and liberal states) that resembled some of the
more regressive nineteenth-​century ideas about political community (Lorimer 1883),
and have been subjected to a fair bit of criticism from within international law (Varaki
2016) and political philosophy. This raises a question about the whole political theory
of international law. Why does it sometimes feel so thin? In the case of Rawls, there is
clearly a sense that possibilities are foreclosed by the nature of international politics, and
that accordingly ambition has to be curtailed and the range of political choices rendered
smaller. The parsimony of these late-​style career swerves, though, has not prevented
international lawyers from developing richly imagined forms of liberal legalism which
seek to thicken out international law’s constitutional (Klabbers et al. 2012) or adminis-
trative (Hovell 2016) frameworks by treating the political theory of the international as
an analogue to the political theory of the state. Meanwhile, cosmopolitan thinking has
not entirely run out of steam, and normative individualism is now reflected in the work
of international criminal courts as well as in the human rights movement. In the end,
though, if there is a liberal political ideal that has flourished since the end of the Cold
War, it lies in the belief that that judicial and quasi-​judicial institutions can promote a
liberal or decent international order through the proliferation (Alter 2014), fragmenta-
tion (Young 2012), or constitutionalization of liberal norms.
Alongside this liberal revival, there have been efforts to reconstruct a natural law
among nations (Tasioulas 1996) or recuperate an idealist tradition in the radical rethink-
ing of the international political and social order (Allott 1990). And, of course, the polit-
ical theory of international law has also responded to specific problems of international
ordering and disordering. These projects have encompassed climate change, poverty,
self-​determination, and fragmentation and two problems I will discuss shortly: inter-
vention and punishment (see Chapters 9 and 25).
Perhaps these liberal, post-​positivist efforts can all be understood as an attempt to dis-
solve sovereignty and establish a single juridical space by building cooperative institu-
tionalisms (Kennedy 1987) or by designing systems of consensual and non-​consensual
(judicial and arbitral) adjudication (Lauterpacht 1933).
 International Law and IPT    65

Modern International Law II: Critique

These normative political theories have not lacked detractors, of course. The great clas-
sical realists had issued warnings about the tendency to imagine humanity’s law as a
law somehow free of ideological contestation. A relatively recent revival of interest in
Carl Schmitt, the German constitutional theorist, has provoked a fresh round of scep-
ticism among lawyers (Howse 2016). Schmitt’s anxieties that international law might
be transformed from an (idealized) inter-​sovereign order (the great achievement
of the European ius publicum) to a repressive criminal law or policing order with its
centre in Washington or New York have influenced a generation of international law-
yers (Simpson 2007; Koskenniemi 2002). But this has been part of a broader resistance
to normative (liberal) political theory itself on the part of critical international lawyers.
This critical scholarship has tended, instead, to celebrate the work of anthropolo-
gists (Eslava 2016), geographers, science and technology scholars, and feminist the-
orists (Otto 1999) to rethink the international legal order not as a normative structure
or basket of rules but as a terrain of expert struggle (Kennedy 2016) or a language and
practice of empire (Anghie 1999; Becker-​Lorca 2015; Miles 2015) or an encounter of jur-
isdictions (drawing on the work of McVeigh 2007) or as a literary (Berman 2011), senti-
mental (Simpson 2015), acoustic (Parker 2015), or gendered (Heathcote 2011) enterprise.
This can be thought of as pre-​normative legal theory: a sweeping away of some unfortu-
nate habits and dispositions in order to move to a thoroughly historicized and politic-
ally responsible practice of international law. The politics of international law, then—​by
rejecting the siren song of abstract normative theorizing from universal positions—​
becomes a way of bringing out the choices made by international lawyers in fully situ-
ated moments of decision.

War and Crime: Two Interventions

in Practice

In each case these various traditions in international political theory have engaged in,
sometimes charged, debates about the shape and purpose of international order, and
have played out in particular in relation to the juridical status of “humanity.” For state-​
oriented conceptions of international law, humanity had very little status as a moral or
political agent. Political theories of global life (from Vattel to Morgenthau and on to
Waltz and Kissinger) emphasized the ethical priority of the national interest or the need
for international law to be founded on the inclinations and practices of states. More lat-
terly, this became a concern for protecting “domestic jurisdiction” or a prohibition on
intervention. On the whole this sovereignist credo had little truck with grand schemes
to remake the world under the banner of “mankind” or even “civilization.” Bismarck’s
66   Gerry Simpson

scepticism towards leaders who invoked “Europe” belongs firmly in this camp. It’s not as
if this tradition lacks radical potential, however. It was precisely the sovereigntist claims
of the Third World that helped undercut the project of Empire during the period of
decolonization. Self-​determination—​first invoked by John Stuart Mill in the late nine-
teenth century—​was in effect a claim to remake the imperial world as a collection of free
sovereigns. This suspicion of “humanity” has carried over into critical approaches to
intervention and punishment where the concept of “humanity” is disentangled to reveal
a form of politics both imperial and violent.
In the case of intervention, the classical conception of war was understood as a clash
of sovereignties in which either international law was absent from any final reckoning
about the war (that would occur at the level of ethics or religion or prudence) or it was
engaged only at the level of applying a legalized ethics of war to the conduct of the armed
conflict itself (ius in bello) (see Chapter 16). The position of the nineteenth-​century
international lawyer was not so different from that of the mid-​to late twentieth-​century
realist in that regard. War was a matter for the political realm and not the legal.
But by the middle of the twentieth century, the inter-​sovereign war had been sub-
jected to quite an extensive network of legal rules found in the UN Charter and in cus-
tomary international law (Nicaragua v. United States, 1986) (see Chapter 17). These rules
were agreed to by states and were largely adhered to or subject to widespread breach
depending on whom one consulted in the pages of the American Journal of International
Law. These rules had been laid down, however, under a largely positivistic conception
of international law—​states had agreed to the prohibition on the use of force and on the
narrow exceptions to it.
The normative theory of force was developed by both political theorists (e.g. Wheeler
2002) and by international lawyers frustrated by the constraints of this legal regime. If
anything, the normative turn was aimed at loosening or liberalizing the Charter regime
in favour of allowing more force. Normative political theory very often argued for the
right to defend vulnerable communities from oppressive or violent or genocidal local
regimes. More recently, critical scholarship has come to this problem by noticing the
way in which law and war have become entwined in a “humanitarianization” of war
and a militarization of humanitarian action (Kennedy 2006), by pointing to the roots
of humanitarian intervention in a history of executive action in the international realm
(Orford 2011) or by showing how the hegemons have traditionally projected power
through ethical programme (Simpson 2004).
In the case of war crimes trials, similar patterns can be observed. The pre-​twentieth
century can be seen as somehow pre-​normative. Impunity was the rule and international
law was a law of impunity. So, if a reader picks up, say, a history of the Concert of Europe
1815–​1914 and reads its passages on war crimes trials or looks for a reference to ending
impunity, such references are simply absent: there are ellipses where there should be tri-
als. Instead of thunderous calls for retribution, we have a gentler language of diplomatic
nicety. “The object of this union is as simple as it is great [ . . . ] calm and consistent in its
proceedings, it has no other object than the maintenance of peace” (Declaration of the
Five Cabinets, Aix-​la-​Chapelle, 15 November 1818).
 International Law and IPT    67

The high-​point of impunity—​perhaps also a turning point—​came when Hitler cele-

brated, and provoked the end of, this impunity with his famous question: “Who remem-
bers the Armenians?” This was, more or less, the sort of amnesia demanded by the
Treaty of Munster back in 1648:

That there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual [ . . . ] Amnesty, or
Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles, [ . . . ]
but that all that has pass’d on the one side, and the other [ . . . ] during the War, shall be
bury’d in eternal Oblivion.

International law, then, was—​to restate the position—​the law of oblivion. International
law’s classical tradition was one in which the priority of sovereignty meant that there
was no point from which to declare an inter-​sovereign armed conflict legal or illegal,
and no locus in which an international war crimes trial might take place. Criminal law
was a matter for the domestic sovereign space. The early twentieth century, then, marks
a moment when international law engaged in a normative turn, the juncture when a
political theory of punishment and retribution, deplored by Schmitt and American
Wilsonians, began to dominate our thinking about the moral and legal consequences
of defeat in war (Simpson 2007). As the prime minister of Italy, Vittorio Orlando, put
it in 1919: “It is only from today that the laws of peoples begins” (Papers Relating to the
Foreign Relations of the United States, 183).
By the middle of the twentieth century, the Westphalian fusion of sovereignty and
amnesia had become deeply unfashionable. Oblivion has given way to war crimes
trials—​all this in the midst of a fetishistic culture of compulsory commemoration. The
rise of retributive legalism, or the application of a theory of criminal punishment to inter-
national affairs, begins at Versailles with the decision to indict the Kaiser for offences
against international morality (a phrase reminiscent of Bentham’s dismissal of inter-
national law itself) and the sanctity of treaties. Meanwhile, the war’s winners were no
longer simply the temporary beneficiaries of fate but the guardians and creators of a new
legal order. This was the politico-​juridical background to the momentous decision on the
part of the Allies in Moscow, implemented later at Nuremberg, to charge the Nazi leader-
ship with the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Needless to
say, this transformation has given rise to a flourishing sub-​field of theorizing about war
crimes trials, some of which seeks to place trial and punishment on a firmer philosoph-
ical footing, or at least subject it to some sort of analysis from the perspective of political
theory (Shklar 1964), international relations (Ralph 2007), or history (Sands 2016). But
alongside this political theory of international criminal justice is a more self-​consciously
critical tradition (sometimes drawing on Arendt or Shklar) that situates war crimes trials
in a history of hegemonic ordering (Krever 2014), judicial theatre (Simpson 2007), jus-
tifications for punitive sanction (Tallgren 2002), and didactic legalism (Douglas 2001).
It is obvious, even from these brief surveys, that the applied political theory of inter-
national law is multiple, varied, and very often interdisciplinary. It is appropriate, then,
to finish this chapter on a cross-​disciplinary note.
68   Gerry Simpson

Political, Historical: Two

Interdisciplinary Turns

From the perspective of an audience of political theorists or international relations

scholars, two interdisciplinary moments seem particularly salient and emblematic. The
first goes back to the various prospectuses for a relationship between international law
and international relations. The second refers to a much more recent encounter between
historians (especially intellectual historians) and public international lawyers.

International Relations and International Law

It would be foolish to assert the existence of a single strand of contemporary inter-
national relations that advances, or is grounded in, an implied political theory of inter-
national law. But excluding obvious denialists (e.g. Waltzians, who had nothing much
to say about international law) and scholars for whom international law is entirely
marginal, there exists a liberal-​constructivist centre in which there is a surprising
degree of continuity about how international law works in the world. One powerful re-​
theorization of international law has been an approach that emphasizes the way in which
local arrangements within states will define the shape and content of international legal
norms (Moravcsik 1997). Others have focused on the vulnerable (Clark 2013) or harmed
(Linklater 2011) to produce accounts of an international order that might redistribute
resources through international legal norms. There was then a tremendous flourishing
in the early 2000s, with the publication of work calling for a new research agenda (Byers
1999) bringing the two fields into some sort of harmony, followed by work that applied
a rather disharmonious rational choice theory to international law (Guzman 2011). This
has been supplemented, in turn, by a series of critical explorations of “the politics of
international law” both reconstructive (Scott 2004) and sceptical (Kennedy 1999).

Turn to History
The politics of international law has now become a kind of historiography of inter-
national law. This is, after all, a peculiarly anti-​historical field in some respects. Some
have argued that the history of international law really only began with Robert Ward’s
An Enquiry into the Foundation and History of International Law in Europe (1795)
(Craven 2016); and certainly since then there have been precious few histories of
international law (Grewe 2000; Schmitt 2006). The publication of Anthony Anghie’s
Sovereignty, Imperialism and International Law, Martti Koskenniemi’s Gentle Civiliser
of Nations, Richard Tuck’s Rights of War and Peace, and a series of revisionist histories by
David Kennedy (Anghie 2007; Koskenniemi 2002; Tuck 1999; Kennedy 1980; 1988; see
 International Law and IPT    69

too Bederman 2001) transformed the scene, and since then there have been a number of
further historical studies (e.g. Becker Lorca 2015; Craven 2007; Pahuja 2011).
Every sub-​field now has its history and then its counterhistory, and then its anxiety
that perhaps all these previous histories were methodologically suspect or even inept—​a
mere writing down of some things that happened and then some other things that hap-
pened but weren’t noticed the first time round. We now seem to be in a third stage, in
which unusually sophisticated accounts of international legal episodes or developments
are the subject of criticism on the grounds of flawed or unconvincing historical method.
And this attention—​mostly sympathetic, robust, friendly—​has come both from within
the discipline and from outside it. This international history displays a willingness to
see the power of international law as an organizing idea of international political life,
an international law that matters hugely in determining how certain worlds were con-
structed, how certain practices were named and renamed, how certain possibilities
were closed, perhaps forever (Brett 2011; Hull 2014; Pedersen 2015). The easy clichés of
an international law somehow always on the outside of a politics or a social practice is
less present in this work. All of this, to take us full circle, has resulted in a sophisticated
and substantial dialogue between historians of political thought and international legal
historians that has at the same time provoked fresh and illuminating contributions to a
now historically conscious political theory of international law.

Note
1. With thanks to Anna Saunders for expert research. I use the terms “political philosophy”
and “political theory” interchangeably throughout the chapter.

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Weston, B., R. A. Falk, and A. D’Amato (1990). International Law and World Order: A Problem-​
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(eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
 ­c hapter 6

Critical Internat i ona l

P olitical T h e ory

Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib

The end of the Cold War ushered in a lively revival of political theory. During the 1990s,
Europe advanced from economic unification to a nascent post-​national political form.
As rapid globalization deepened economic, legal, and administrative ties beyond the
state, cosmopolitanism no longer seemed a matter of mere speculation. The novelty of
a world order beyond state sovereignty started to come into view, and with it, ambitious
and optimistic gestures towards political possibilities for the new millennium suggested
themselves. Critiques of Westphalian sovereignty abounded alongside hopes that justice
would extend across borders, and that International Human Rights Law (IHRL) might
rival the power of states. One of the most influential voices to emerge during this period
was the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who called for post-​national democracy and
the constitutionalization of international law (Habermas 2001). Habermas’s turn from
domestic to international politics helped to initiate critical theory’s sustained engage-
ment with issues related to sovereignty, human rights, and world order. This chapter will
explore the conversations that resulted from this turn.
The optimism of the 1990s was short-​lived, as September 11, 2001 and its aftermath
opened a new era of international crises. Critical Theory’s response to post-​9/​11 crises—​
from the ascendance of American hegemony and “war on terror” to exclusions in the
face of mass migrations, environmental degradation, and the accumulation of power by
transnational corporations—​exposes an uneasiness, an ambivalence at the core of the
post-​national project. Where some view cosmopolitanism as an emancipatory project,
offering solutions to the aforementioned crises, others call it the façade of neo-​liberal
empires. A divide has come into focus among critical theorists between sovereigntists
and cosmopolitans. At stake is Critical Theory’s normative stance toward the nation-​
state itself: is the sovereign state a source of emancipation or emancipation’s greatest
obstacle?
In what follows, we take account of the fact that Critical Theory has migrated over the
last half-​century away from its origins in the work of the Frankfurt School alone, and is
 Critical International Political Theory    75

a title now claimed by theorists who employ deconstruction (à la Jacques Derrida), psy-
choanalysis, feminist, and post-​colonial forms of critique. There have also been scholars
in international relations who have adopted these methods of analysis, thus leading to a
novel convergence between Critical Theory and international relations studies.
We begin by outlining Critical Theory’s history and recent convergence with inter-
national political theory. We then survey the field through engagement with three cen-
tral moments in the debate over sovereignty. First, we consider arguments, bourgeoning
in the 1990s, in favour of cosmopolitanism (see Chapter 3). Next, we explore critical re-​
evaluations of sovereignty in the wake of 9/​11 and the American “war on terror.” Finally,
we discuss the recent return to sovereignty within Critical Theory. With Britain’s exit
from the EU now pending, the idea of turning from cosmopolitan integration back to
sovereignty has become all too real. We conclude by considering current approaches
that call for a nuanced evaluation of the relationship between sovereignty and cosmo-
politanism in order to rethink the institutional configuration of a world order that is
already decidedly post-​national.

Critical Theory
and International Relations

Critical theory describes a broad methodological tradition of interdisciplinary social

and political theory and research. It finds its roots in the Frankfurt School, which ori-
ginated in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt in association with the Institute for Social
Research. Figures like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert
Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin were early members, while Jürgen Habermas has exer-
cised the greatest influence from among the second and third generations of Frankfurt
School scholars.
Initially, Critical Theory did not take international relations, institutions, and pol-
itics as its subject. Critique was aimed primarily at forms of domination inscribed in
the economic, cultural, and psycho-​social conditions of domestic, i.e. national society,
understood as the “social totality.” Early critical theorists were particularly interested in
the authoritarian tendencies of putatively liberal societies. They employed immanent
critique in order to understand historical trajectories and conditions that shaped the
social totality and its contradictions. Such contradictions produced crisis, which in turn
opened possibilities for transformation and emancipation. The goal of the theorist was
to explicate the contradictory totality of conditions through immanent critique in order
to reveal how things could be otherwise; the critical theorist always sought emancipa-
tion from contemporary conditions of domination (Devetak 2009).
The shift away from the nation-​state viewed as the “social totality” toward inter-
national and transnational spheres should come as no surprise. Kant and Marx, forerun-
ners in the tradition of critique, were both concerned with the international conditions
76    Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib

of possibility for political emancipation (Devetak 2009). Karl Marx’s critiques laid bare
the transnational structures of capitalism that cause domination (see Chapter 49).
Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, had outlined international constitutional condi-
tions for domestic republican freedom; he also formulated the original proposal for
“cosmopolitan right” (Kant 1991 [1795]). While some critical theories of recognition
have retained a primarily domestic scope, much of contemporary Critical Theory has
returned to the projects proposed by Kant and Marx.
Furthermore, contemporary international political theorists such as Robert Cox,
Andrew Linklater, Cynthia Weber, and Kimberly Hutchings follow an approach that
reflects Horkheimer’s (1999 [1937]) distinction between traditional and Critical Theory.
Traditional theory seeks generalizations and law-​like regularities, which make society’s
pathologies appear natural and immutable, thus precluding the possibility of critique.
Traditional theories engage in “problem-​solving” within a given framework, rather than
questioning the framework itself (Cox 1981). Realism is a traditional theory: it makes
fundamental assumptions about a law-​like balance of power that emerges from natural
anarchy among states. Linklater (1998) has done much to debunk the Realists’ assump-
tion that the state is a natural and immutable form. He argues that this assumption
unwittingly upholds the status quo, making us overlook opportunities for emancipation
and the fulfilment of rights made possible by post-​Westphalian political forms.
At the same time that scholars were incorporating Critical Theory into international
relations, many critical theorists followed Habermas’s lead in extending immanent cri-
tique to international affairs. In the next section, we consider how debates over the end
of sovereignty and rise of cosmopolitanism changed the landscape of Critical Theory.

The End of Sovereignty: Habermasian

Critical Theory

It is widely recognized that in the last thirty years, the forces of globalization have
begun to overtake the boundaries of the Westphalian nation-​state, resulting in what
Habermas (2001) calls “the post-​national constellation.” While the modern nation-​
state has enabled the actualization of valuable social ideals, such as solidarity and
self-​determination, the task ahead is to incorporate them into projects for global gov-
ernance. For Habermas, cosmopolitanism offers possibilities for the “inclusion of the
other” which go beyond the singularly national sovereigntist imaginary with its own
forms of domination and exclusion. Thus, one important direction taken by Critical
Theory is to theorize the politics of international human rights. Linklater (1998) also
points out that the totalizing project of the sovereign state shuts out other possibilities
for political community, including regional and global governance; and so another dir-
ection of cosmopolitan Critical Theory has been to address how governance changes as
sovereignty wanes.
 Critical International Political Theory    77

The cosmopolitan project is, first and foremost, a legal project that aims to extend
rights to all persons regardless of national belonging. The imperative of cosmopolitan
right revealed itself in the aftermath of the atrocities and displacements of the Second
World War. The unprecedented crisis of statelessness wrought by the War revealed an
irony, namely that the promise of universal rights accruing to us in virtue of our human-
ity alone seemed an empty one. Our bare humanity guaranteed us nothing at all, in the
absence of institutions and binding treaties to compel states to respect the rights of the
“stateless.” Hannah Arendt, who in response declared that there must be a “right to have
rights,” was the first to comprehend the conundrum of rightlessness in a world of sover-
eign states (Arendt 1976 [1951]).
Arendt’s influence on contemporary Critical Theory is strong in discourses about the
rights of migrants and refugees (e.g. Balibar 2004; Benhabib 2004; Gündogdu 2015). In
2014, the UN declared that for the first time since the Second World War, the number
of refugees in the world has exceeded 50 million; in 2016, that number stood around 65
million. In the context of growing crisis, the assignment, as well as enactment, of rights
have become primary objectives of normative reconstruction within Critical Theory.
As Arendt understood, state-​centred solutions to rightlessness are inadequate. New
possibilities have been opened up by waning sovereignty and the development of inter-
national human rights law (IHRL).
Including the other in an age of mass migration and multiculturalism requires
rethinking the relationship between cosmopolitanism and democratic self-​governance
(see Chapter 13). Benhabib (2006) suggests that universal human rights should be imple-
mented within states and municipalities through the jurisgenerative process of demo-
cratic iterations, in which democratic majorities reiterate universal norms, rights, and
principles and incorporate them into democratic will-​formation through argument,
contestation, and revision. Etienne Balibar’s (2004) Critical Theory of immigration is
more sceptical about cosmopolitan inclusion. He worries that cosmopolitan integration
brings with it a residue of exclusion against non-​European foreigners, migrants, and
refugees. In order to avoid the rising “apartheid in Europe,” Balibar calls for the democ-
ratization of bordering practices related to those others—​aliens, migrants, refugees—​
who reside within Europe. His suggestion that borders be democratized is not far from
Benhabib’s, yet there is a substantial difference in their optimism about cosmopolitan
integration on the European level.
Discourses about the “rights of others” have harked back to Critical Theory’s Marxian
roots by attending to the ways in which the human rights regime is itself the product of
power, politics, and history. For example, scholars are coming to grips with the ways in
which cosmopolitanism is historically linked to the spread of commercial capitalism
(Douzinas 2007). The EU, for example, originated as a trade community, and its courts
are committed to upholding the “free movement of goods, services, capital and per-
sons,” sometimes at the cost of democratic politics. The idea that protections for capital
and human rights spread together is a problem for Critical Theory. In response, Nancy
Fraser (2009) and others are committed to understanding the ways in which global
78    Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib

capitalism undermines the project of emancipation, and in this context, she has called
for a return to grand social theorizing in the tradition of Marx and Karl Polanyi.
More sceptical lines of critique against cosmopolitanism have turned disillusionment
into the wholesale abandonment of human rights as a political programme. Sam Moyn
(2012) claims that human rights as we understand them now are an invention of the
1970s. Human rights are an anti-​political last utopia, a poor replacement for the failed
politics of the past. Moyn’s history papers over alternative narratives of the politicization
of human rights. Sociologists of law, for example, have taken interest in social move-
ments, democratic constituencies, and individuals who, enabled by the human rights
regime, have risen from below in order to make claims, sparking politics by demanding
rights (de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-​Garavito 2005).
A critical theoretical approach to human rights is necessarily democratic. According
to Habermas, rights and democracy are co-​original. They require one another, and
therefore, universal human rights and democratic governance beyond the state are
inextricable components in any normative reconstruction of the post-​national con-
stellation. Current modes of transnational decision-​making and policy have carried on
largely without democratic legitimation, fracturing and obscuring accountability (see
Chapters 30 and 34). This also means that under conditions of globalization many com-
munities have no political efficacy vis-​à-​vis the transnational forces, strong states, and
international players who impact their lives. Nancy Fraser (2009) calls this problem
“abnormal justice,” and it requires that Critical Theory work to reframe justice, i.e. to
rethink democracy in cosmopolitan form.
Habermas’s proposal for cosmopolitan democracy is a three-​tiered system of “glo-
bal governance without a world government,” which features state, supranational,
and transnational institutions (Habermas 2008). The supranational level comprises a
reformed UN, which preserves peace and guarantees human rights. At the transnational
level, heterarchical relations among domain-​specific organizations and states are bol-
stered by increased democratic legitimacy from regional governance institutions (e.g.
EU and NAFTA). States are retained as the bastions of democratic legitimation; they
work to maintain the functions of welfare in conjunction with regional governance
organizations. This model proposes a conception of world politics which takes not only
states but also individuals as the founding subjects of a world constitution.
Postwar Europe has provided Habermas an example of a cosmopolitan model,
and it has also been an experiment in the expansion of the deliberative public sphere
beyond the nation-​state. In a Habermasian model of democracy, which relies norma-
tively on discourse ethics, deliberation in the public sphere is a source of legitimation.
As publics overtake the boundaries of their own legislative institutions, the simple
correspondence between deliberation and domestic legislatures has to be amended.
In his theory of “republican cosmopolitanism,” James Bohman (2007) argues that
Habermas’s state-​centric conception of the demos cannot accommodate emerg-
ing transnational publics. By contrast, he has suggested that we shift the conception
of demos to transnational demoi (Bohman 2007)—​an idea that embraces the plural
nature of emerging global publics and draws attention to global legal pluralism, itself
 Critical International Political Theory    79

an emerging theme of interest (Cohen 2012; Teubner 1997). He is optimistic that, as

deliberation overtakes national boundaries, so too will corresponding legal and polit-
ical institutions.
For Hauke Brunkhorst (2005), solidarity motivates civic and legal unity in post-​
national deliberating publics. In our age, only solidarity—​not nationalism or other par-
ticularist ties—​can form the basis of the formal legal-​constitutional recognition that
underpins cosmopolitan citizenship. Indeed, constitutional and legal themes have come
to the forefront of Habermasian Critical Theory. William Scheuerman (2016) has even
spoken of a “legalization of Critical Theory” that has taken place since the publication of
Between Facts and Norms (1996), and which can be found in the development of global
constitutionalism as both a normative ideal and a field of study. As a field, global con-
stitutionalism considers the ways in which transnational norms and international law
crystallize into a constitutional order beyond the nation-​state, an order that impinges on
state sovereignty. The constitutions of nation-​states exist alongside, and sometimes in a
productive tension with, international constitutions. Isiksel (2016) argues that Europe
already, in fact, has a functional constitution, albeit one that is neither liberal nor demo-
cratic in the sense of state constitution. But can functional constitutions obtain the
democratic legitimacy that state constitutions have? This debate, under way and grow-
ing in urgency, is far from settled. The indeterminate relationship between functional
supranational constitutions, international law, and state constitutions is obscure at the
moment and has added to the rise of global legal pluralism, a topic whose surface critical
theorists have only begun to scratch.
Habermasian Critical Theory remains optimistic about these developments, and this
optimism has not gone unchallenged. It is on exactly these topics that the gap between
the Frankfurt School and post-​structural approaches is at its widest. In the next section,
we will see that the crisis of sovereignty following 9/​11 has created strange bedfellows
and new divisions within the field of Critical Theory.

Sovereignty at its Limit:

Post-​structural Responses to
the American War on Terror

While a number of critical theorists had embarked on international political theory in

the 1990s, it was the events of September 11, 2001 that gathered the field en masse around
topics of international terror and American foreign policy. The politics of the George
W. Bush administration exposed the dark side of globalization, bringing forth trenchant
and vociferous critiques of purportedly false universals, including cosmopolitanism
itself (Douzinas 2007). Furthermore, American actions in “war on terror” and abuses
of executive prerogative have called into question the waning of sovereignty assumed by
early international Critical Theory.
80    Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib

In the immediate wake of the 9/​11 attacks, Habermas and Derrida sat separately with
Giovanna Borradori to give interviews on terror and terrorism (Borradori 2003). Given
their previous disagreements on fundamental philosophical issues, the Borradori inter-
views represent a remarkable convergence in which the two leading critical theorists,
as representatives of Europe, respond to oncoming geopolitical crisis. For Derrida, ter-
rorism is the outgrowth of “autoimmunarity,” i.e. the self-​defeating nature of Western
power turned back on itself. Habermas points to the extreme inequality wrought by glo-
balization, which leads to discontent and violence, exposing the unfinished nature of
the Enlightenment project. Worried about excessive American sovereignty, both direct
their hopes to the possibility of strengthening international law and creating cosmopol-
itan conditions of hospitality. Amidst the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, they also penned
a joint letter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which they identified Europe as
specially positioned to advance “a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law”
against American unilateralism (Derrida and Habermas 2003).
They were right to fear that an attack on US soil would cause the American sover-
eign to rear its head. Ironically, waning sovereignty and new, insidious exertions of sov-
ereignty have appeared to develop in tandem. For example, Wendy Brown (2010) has
noted that the waning of sovereignty has been accompanied by a vast proliferation of
border walls and the securitization of borders. Nationalists, backed into a corner by glo-
balization, lash out at foreigners and attempt to fortify the crumbling borders of their
world against forces of change.
Post-​structuralist scholars have focused intensely on issues of sovereign violence
(Bargu 2014; Hutchings and Frazer 2011a; 2011b), and Derridian and Lacanian variations
of psychoanalysis have assumed prominence among responses to millennial geopolitics
(Butler 2016; Zizek 2002). The dark side of sovereignty reveals itself in extra-​legal abuses
of executive power, such as the extra-​territorial detention and torture of “enemy combat-
ants” at Guantanamo Bay. For Agamben (2005), sovereignty is part of a system in which
extra-​legal action is already inscribed into the liberal constitutional order. Following
Carl Schmitt’s theory of the “state of exception,” he shows how the sovereign is able to
impose its will beyond the pale of the law. In Political Theology (1985 [1922]), Schmitt had
claimed, among other things, that the sovereign reveals itself by claiming the power to
make a decision during a state of exception. Accordingly, Agamben observes the reve-
lation of sovereignty when states enact violence in extra-​legal spaces like Guantanamo.
Agamben is not the only one to draw influence from the brilliant and infamous Nazi
legal theorist. Schmitt has enjoyed an ebb and flow of popularity among political theorists
since his works started to appear in English translation in the 1980s. His oeuvre, often con-
troversially, has lent itself to the zeitgeist on a number of topics in Critical International
Political Theory. Marxist scholars who have employed his concept of the political to cri-
tique liberalism have been termed “Left-​Schmittians.” In particular, Chantal Mouffe
(2000) has advocated using Schmitt’s (1996 [1927]) concept of the political—​the antagon-
istic distinction between friend and foe—​as the basis of agonistic democratic theory. Carl
Schmitt was an ardent critic of liberalism, calling it a depoliticizing façade that masks
real power. For Mouffe, this critique can be extended not only to the disingenuousness of
American liberal internationalism but also to liberal cosmopolitanism per se.
 Critical International Political Theory    81

The Schmittian critique of liberal cosmopolitanism is that, like US hegemony, it cre-

ates unipolarity. Cosmopolitans seek to unify the world order under international law—​a
move that some think masks the ambitions of power-​players behind the seemingly benign
mission of human rights. Even those wary of Schmitt’s politics have at times invoked his
account of the “pluriversum,” in which powers on the world stage balance each other
out (Buck-​Morss 2008). If American sovereignty will not submit to the constraints of
international law, perhaps it could at least be balanced out. Jean Cohen has suggested
that such a pluriverse of equal sovereignty could be achieved in conjunction with inter-
national law (Cohen 2012). Schmitt himself would have contested the compatibility of a
political pluriversum and international law. He hoped that balance would be reinstated
after the War through the division of the world into great spaces (Großräume), which
would counteract the disproportionate accumulation by any one power block (Schmitt
2006 [1950]). Scholars have noted that through his influence on Hans Morgenthau and
other early IR theorists, Schmitt’s ideas about the geopolitical balance of power have been
influential for theories of Realism (Koskenniemi 2002; Scheuerman 1999). Therefore, the
popularity of Schmitt among critical international political theorists is surprising, con-
sidering their opposition to Realism (e.g. Linklater 1998).
In the end, the turn to Schmitt cannot help but be a turn against cosmopolitanism.
The theme that unifies his enormous oeuvre is his critique of liberal universalism.
Universalism lies at the heart of cosmopolitanism, even when cosmopolitanism is con-
ceived as a political project of democratic movements claiming and reiterating rights
from below. As Jurkevics (2016) points out in a comparison with Arendt’s geopolitics,
the Schmittian worldview is not compatible with critical theories of cosmopolitan-
ism. In The Divided West, Habermas poses the future world order as a choice between
Schmitt and Kant, between the unbounded competition for power among hemispheric
powers on the one hand, and the constitutionalization of international law on the other
(Habermas 2006). The choice that Habermas presents is, in essence, between preserving
state-​centred sovereignty or surpassing it.
There is yet another dimension to the critique of cosmopolitanism, which we explore
in the next section, and that is the critique of international law as a project of empire. We
will see that, within Critical Theory, some have moved from the critique of cosmopolit-
anism as empire to the claim that preserving (equal) sovereignty is, in fact, the route to
emancipation.

Return to Sovereignty: The Equal

Sovereignty of States against Empire

The critique of empire brings together critical and post-​colonial theory, the latter under-
stood as a broad set of literatures interested in imperialism and the fate of formerly col-
onized societies. One of the best-​known critiques of empire comes from Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri (2000). Hardt and Negri differentiate between imperialism and
82    Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib

empire in order to capture the logic of the international system. Imperialism is a violent
and exploitative system which enables alien power to impose its will on (and plunder)
another society. “Empire,” on the other hand, refers to an anonymous network of rules,
regulations, and structures that serve global capitalism. The creeping power of empire
threatens to undermine other social logics; it puts into place a seemingly immoveable
structure of domination, against which diffuse peoples, understood as “the multitude,”
must rebel. But which institutions are not complicit in empire? By including all current
forms of international law and post-​national governance, Hardt and Negri make the
emancipatory aspect of their programme questionable.
Other theorists have investigated the history of imperialism and its implications for
Western emancipatory philosophy. For example, Thomas McCarthy shifts Frankfurt-​
style theory away from Western societies with his careful history of the co-​implication
of liberalism and imperialism in his work Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human
Development (2009). While Habermas focuses on Kant’s legal thought, McCarthy
reminds us of Kant’s insidious writings on race and hierarchy. The historical interrelated-
ness of liberalism and racist imperialism does not deter McCarthy from emancipatory
possibilities—​he formulates a Critical Theory of development against imperialism.
Susan Buck-​Morss (2009) has also shed light on the connections between European
philosophy and the legacies of imperialism. She brings Hegel’s master–​slave dialectic
to bear on an analysis of revolutions, engaging in what she calls “universal history.” She
considers how the ideals of the French Revolution—​liberty, equality, fraternity—​only
first actualized in the Haitian revolution. Buck-​Morss’s study is important because it
brings our attention to domination as a literal problem of slavery in colonial societies.
One response to the critique of empire has been to embrace the sovereign equality
of states. The origins of sovereign equality can be found in the era of decolonization,
at a time when the guarantee of a formal equality of states on the world stage—​and
the concomitant seat in the general assembly of the UN—​was a vast improvement for
formerly colonized states. The principle of sovereign equality entails respect for self-​
determination and non-​intervention. Jean Cohen (2012) measures this principle, which
aims to secure a seat at the bargaining table for weak states, against the imperial dimen-
sions of international law. For her, sovereign equality is an indispensable bastion of self-​
determination against the encroachment of empire. According to Cohen, instead of
overcoming sovereignty, we should embrace it. However, this does not amount to the
abandonment of international law.
Christina Lafont (2015) has also argued that it is possible to conceive of sovereign
equality and international law as mutually reinforcing. She shows how the Responsibility
to Protect doctrine (R2P) has been invoked by domestic populations as a defence
against encroachments from transnational corporations and the WTO. Domestic act-
ors have claimed that enforcing transnational regulations, which are adopted to serve
the interests of global capital, can undermine their ability to protect their own popu-
lations. Such cases show that the interventionist intentions of R2P can be subverted by
domestic actors in the name of self-​determination. Lafont’s contribution points to the
idea that we need not abandon the growing human rights regime in order to preserve
 Critical International Political Theory    83

self-​determination. New theories in this vein have helped to break down the exagger-
ated dichotomy between sovereignty and cosmopolitanism (Benhabib 2016). While
international law may weaken state sovereignty, it can enhance popular sovereignty
within states. Benhabib has emphasized that transnational human rights can be claimed
by marginalized and excluded groups and individuals to make a state more democratic,
thus strengthening the ability of the people to govern themselves under conditions of
globalization (Benhabib 2016).
While popular sovereignty and cosmopolitanism need not be at odds, external state
sovereignty and post-​national integration are not as easily reconciled. In the context
of Europe, the call for a return to sovereignty is particularly loaded, as it would be
tantamount to the dissolution of the EU. Nowhere is this tension more apparent than
in the controversy over Brexit. The stakes of this debate are brought into relief in the
recent debate between Wolfgang Streeck and Habermas over the future of Europe in
the wake of monetary crisis. Streeck (2013) calls for the dissolution of the European
Monetary Union (EMU), which tethers states together through shared currency and
monetary policy. He claims that when strong states, i.e. Germany, implement auster-
ity and control inflation rates, it causes weaker states to lose control of their welfare
states, since they cannot engage in inflationary measures to maintain their levels of
social spending. The southern European governments are strapped by the union, and
lose control of domestic democratic politics. Habermas’s (2013) response is to hold
steadfast: the EU should be democratized through the strengthening of the European
legislature and by moving from a monetary to a fiscal union. A return to state sover-
eignty is nostalgic, and underestimates the inability of contemporary states to main-
tain democracy apart from post-​national integration. As the democratization of the
European Union stalls, questions about post-​national integration are left troublingly
unanswered.

Reconfiguring Sovereignty: Critical

Theory at a Crossroads

Globalization has forced international issues onto Critical Theory’s agenda, and they
are unlikely to abate. Where is Critical International Political Theory headed? With
regard to the debates outlined in this chapter, the discord in responses to the crises of
the twenty-​first century suggests that state sovereignty may be neither the promise
nor the pathology of our era. The split between sovereigntist and cosmopolitan camps
might soften in normative theories, as we see in the latest research (Benhabib 2016).
Yet the praxis of sovereignty and post-​national integration will likely remain controver-
sial, and disagreements over the praxis of post-​national politics are likely to proliferate.
What is clear is that state sovereignty is no longer monolithic. The complete return to a
pre-​globalized world is not possible, and a more fruitful route for theory/​practice lies
84    Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib

in rethinking the institutional configuration of a world order that is already decidedly

post-​national.
Cosmopolitanism from below is promising in this respect. Sociologists of law have
paid special attention to social movements that strategically target national and sub-​
national democratic institutions for the implementation of human rights norms
(Benhabib 2011; de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-​Garavito 2005). Critical Theory’s
interdisciplinary methodology lends itself to the incorporation of new empirical
research on grassroots cosmopolitanism. International law is an important resource
for social movements in weak states, and its capacity to strengthen democratic self-​
determination—​along the lines of Lafont’s suggestion—​deserves more attention. If we
resist the temptation to understand sovereignty as assigning a jurisdiction the last and
final say, and instead look to state boundaries as sites of implementation and iteration, it
is possible to see how the relationship between states and international law can be nor-
matively reconstructed towards emancipation.
A Critical Theory of international affairs demands attention to law, but does con-
tinued focus on the legal dimensions of globalization lead Critical Theory too far from
the original project of theorizing the social totality? Some worry that contemporary
Critical Theory suffers from a lack of social theory, and has given itself over to “legalism”
and “moralism.” However, sociologists of law would not agree that to study law is neces-
sarily to abandon social theory. A critical approach requires an eye to the social and
economic conditions that both determine law’s structure and, in turn, are influenced by
law. It is true that most contemporary Critical Theory has not engaged in a total critique
of capitalism. Compared to earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, current theory
has a subdued tone with regard to the seemingly untamable ravages of global capital-
ism. Emancipation as the complete transformation of the economic order is no longer
on the agenda. In lieu of such possibilities, emancipation has been sought in the trans-
formation of legal orders and democratic control over transnational institutions. As the
EU matures, international courts continue to develop, and international human rights
law (IHRL) increasingly binds the actions of states, it is no wonder that critical theorists
have focused on the emancipatory potential of law.
Still, with regard to cosmopolitan, post-​national integration, Critical Theory stands
at a crossroads, and the road forward is indeed unclear. The challenge is to establish
whether principles and values associated with democracies housed in nation-​states—​
i.e. self-​government, transparency, accountability, and solidarity—​can be extended to
transnational institutions increasingly spreading in our world. Critical Theory’s self-​
reflexive impulse—​to inspect the conditions of critique itself—​turns critique back on
itself. Is Critical Theory capable of overcoming “methodological nationalism,” in Ulrich
Beck’s (2006) words, and moving toward a Critical Theory of the transnational and the
new global?
If the proliferation of different modes of critique and debates over the future of the
sovereign state persist, then this may simply be a sign that the tradition of the Frankfurt
School—​its heirs and opponents alike—​is flourishing in response to the continued dif-
ferentiation of system, lifeworld, and the global public.
 Critical International Political Theory    85

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 ­c hapter 7

F em inist Inte rnat i ona l

P olitical T h e ory

Laura Sjoberg

“Historians have found scattered evidence of male prostitutes in brothels and mili-
tary camps,” many of whom “may have managed to keep their sex concealed” (Ringdal
2004: 278). Browyn Winter (2011: 376) notes that male prostitution around US military
bases in the Philippines has become more prevalent as female prostitution (though not
soliciting or pimping) has been made illegal, while there is “no law against male prosti-
tution as prostitutes are defined as female.” In Thailand, Sevil Sonmez, Eugenia Wickens,
and Yorghos Apostolopoulos (2007: 222) note that “there is widespread male prostitu-
tion [ . . . ] which is numerically nearly as extensive as female prostitution,” and that
it is used significantly by US military installations. John Lie (1995: 322) suggested that
male prostitutes have become visible around US military bases in Hong Kong, Japan,
and Korea, and that their number is growing. Joseph Sheley (1995) accounts for fully a
third of arrests for near-​base prostitution being of male prostitutes, but wonders why
they receive comparatively little attention in either criminology or policy work. Some
work has suggested (e.g. Jackson 2010) that some (male) members of the service have
engaged in prostitution, serving other (male) members of the military for money. Katz
(1976: 78) details that this can be a quite complex situation, telling stories of encoun-
ters with soldiers across the United States and around the world. This story is repeated
around a number of military bases. What we do know, then, is that male military prosti-
tution exists, both where male members of the military prostitute themselves and where
male civilians serve as prostitutes for the male members of the military. What there is
less information about is how frequent that prostitution is, local dynamics about how it
works around different bases around the world, and how and why it comes to happen.
We know little about any prostitutes or prostitution industries, but even less about the
ways that male prostitution functions within and around military bases.
So, what does the existence of male prostitution around United States military bases
in the US and abroad have to do with thinking about feminist International Political
Theory (IPT)? This chapter structures its explorations of feminist IPT around the
88   Laura Sjoberg

questions brought up by recognizing male prostitution around military bases, look-

ing simultaneously at the content of feminist IPT and its applicability. These questions
include asking where men and women are in global politics, thinking about what gender
means, analysing significations of gender and sexuality, and engaging the implications
of those significations for militarism specifically and global politics generally.

Where Are the Women

in Global Politics?

While a significant amount of feminist political theorizing has always been inter-
national in scope explicitly (talking about women’s needs or rights around the world)
or implicitly (concerned with gender in a universal sense), gender and feminism
came to the body of scholarship identifiable as international political theorizing both
later than it came to political theorizing more generally and after the development of
many strands of IPT. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminist thinkers like J. Ann
Tickner, V. Spike Peterson, Anne Sisson Runyan, Christine Sylvester, Cynthia Enloe,
and Jan Jindy Pettman started explicitly asking about gender biases in International
Relations Theory (IRT), with an eye towards a normative feminist IPT. One of the dir-
ections that this early work shared was calling attention to the omission of women in
IR’s empirical work, and in IPT’s normative work. Cynthia Enloe’s (1983) simple but
catchy phrasing of this concern—​“Where are the women?”—​captured many complex
concerns.
The question “Where are the women?” was a representational concern—​suggesting
that women had been neglected in IR analyses. But what was phrased as a represen-
tational concern was also both a substantive concern and a normative one. The sub-
stantive concern was that work that neglected locating and paying attention to women
failed to tell a comprehensive story of whatever phenomenon was being studied. The
normative concern was that the omission of women from the stories of global politics
is not incidental—​it is a structuring of social and political theorizing around masculine
ideas and masculine subjects, resulting in the subordination of and marginalization of
women and sites associated with femininity in global politics. As J. Ann Tickner (1988)
pointed out, “international relations is a man’s world, a world of power and conflict in
which war is a privileged activity.” As Joan Acker (1990: 142) has argued “as a relational
phenomenon, gender is difficult to see when only the masculine is present” so “men
[ . . . ] take their behavior and perspectives to represent the human.” This concern with
what happens to people who do not receive attention in thinking about what is and/​or
should be going on in global politics led feminist theorists to a methodological interest
in searching for silences in IPT (e.g. Charlesworth 1999), and focus on the power rela-
tion of gender representation in global politics. As Jill Steans (1998: 5, emphasis original)
once described “to look at the world through gender lenses is to focus on gender as a
 Feminist International Political Theory    89

particular kind of power relation [ . . . ] focus on the everyday experiences of women as

women and highlight the consequences of their unequal position.”
Highlighting the inequality of women as women in early feminist IPT has broad-
ened as feminist IPT work has evolved. For example, the question posed at the begin-
ning of this chapter about male military prostitution is not about women, but I would
argue that it has a place not only in feminist IPT, but in the logic of the feminist IPT
that asked questions about women’s representation. As many feminist theorists have
pointed out, the under-​representation of women in IPT is not just incidental—​its an
under-​representation based on them being women. Yet the focus of IR theory and IPT
specifically on men (either explicitly or by implication) has largely been treating men as
gender-​neutral representatives of the human instead of analysing men as men. Asking
“Where are the men?”, then, is mundane if it means looking for the male bodies that
receive attention. But if it means looking for what happens to men as men—​masculinity,
sexuality, and power in politics, that is different. And, I would argue, such an approach
furthers the goals of feminist inquiry interested in looking at gender as a power relation.
The analysis, then, would not be about the relative disempowerment of male prostitutes
vis-​à-​vis female prostitutes, but instead about the ways that sex, gender, and gender
expectations constitute and are constituted by military prostitution assemblages.

Thinking About What Gender Means

Thinking about the ways that sex, gender, and gender expectations constitute and are
constituted by military prostitution assemblages requires both theoretical and nor-
mative understandings of sex, gender, and gender expectations. As traditionally
understood, sex is the biological maleness and biological femaleness of bodies. My
explorations of male bodies in military prostitution started out as an exploration of
sex. I had read Katherine Moon’s (1997) book on base prostitution, and Aaron Belkin’s
(2012) book on homoeroticism in an avowedly straight US military. I wondered about
the lack of male prostitutes in Moon’s analysis of prostitution, and the lack of prosti-
tution in Belkin’s analysis of male bodies in militaries. So I started looking for broth-
els with male prostitutes. My original (over-​simple) assumption was that male brothels
would be like female brothels—​perhaps one right next to another, functioning in similar
ways, for different groups of potential patrons. This assumption was based on two par-
allel underlying assumptions: that there is nothing essentially different about men and
women because they are men and women, and that gender dynamics did not play a sig-
nificant role in constructing male prostitution as different from female prostitution. The
first assumption was rooted in feminist theory; the second was the result of inadequate
reflection.
Feminist theorists have held very different views on the question of whether or not
there is an essential difference between people who are women and people who are men
based on biological differences. Some have argued that women are inherently more
90   Laura Sjoberg

peaceful or more passive than men, and that men are inherently more aggressive, or
even sex-​seeking. Others have suggested that the biological differences between men
and women, to the extent that they exist, do not constitute men and women as different
sorts of people. Still others have argued further that even sex is performative—​that is,
that there is no such thing as settled biological maleness or femaleness (e.g. Butler 1990;
1993). It is safe to say that a non-​essentialist view of sex has come to be dominant, though
not exclusive, in feminist IPT.
So if men and women are not essentially different, then some in IPT (male and female
alike) make the baseline assumption that men and women will behave the same way
and be similarly situated—​the assumption that started out my inquiry into male mili-
tary prostitution. That ignores, however, the presence of gendering in those dynamics—​
assumptions about both relative value and differing essential characteristics of men and
women, masculinities and femininities—​that govern how people and institutions treat,
manage, and position people. In Laura Shepherd’s (2010: 5) description, “gender” is a
noun (identity), a verb (action), and “a logic which is product/​productive of perform-
ances of violence and security.” Gender as an identity is attributed to people—​they are
labelled male, female, masculine, feminine, etc. Gender as an action is events and pro-
cesses where people, ideas, data, research, and places are gendered—​associated with
masculinities and femininities. Gender as a logic is the deployment of masculinities and
femininities in narratives that justify violence, hierarchy, and subordination.
A significant amount of feminist IPT has focused on questions of why and how
women (and other people and actors) come to be associated with femininity in global
politics, and how that feminization is a tool of devalorization (e.g. Peterson 2010). A sig-
nificant amount of queer IPT has focused on the ways that logics of feminization have
been overlaid with assumptions of heteronormativity and related heterosexism (e.g.
Picq and Thiel 2015). This work has suggested that it is impossible to understand the
major concepts in global politics—​from sovereignty to development to war—​without
understanding the role played by the logics of sex, gender, and sexuality (Sjoberg 2013;
Weber 2016).
Returning, then, to male prostitution in militaries, these insights might be applied.
Aaron Belkin recently provided compelling evidence for the thesis that (presumed
straight and pure) US military masculinity relies on a homoerotic subculture of endur-
ance and penetration in order to construct the idealized militarized masculinity that
many feminists (e.g. Enloe 2010; Goldstein 2001) have recognized as crucial to the abil-
ity and willingness of militaries to fight. Belkin argues that the conventional wisdom that
such a stark, hypermasculine image of the ideal soldier must be constructed with a dis-
avowal of the othered, queer masculinities that might get in its way is an oversimplified
understanding. It has been assumed that this disavowal is an outsiders’ disavowal—​one
that requires a lack of experience with, and a disgust for, the homoerotic masculinities
that would seem to be diametrically opposed to idealized militarized masculinity.
Instead, Belkin (2012: 4) suggests that soldiers “enter into intimate relationships with
femininity, queerness, and other unmasculine foils, not just to disavow them.” In other
words, it is an insiders’ disavowal—​a disavowal through the practice, endurance, and
 Feminist International Political Theory    91

internal rejection of the homoerotic other in self. Belkin suggests that this subculture
of the construction of US militarized masculinity on and through acts which would
initially seem antithetical to it is often invisible on the surface (2012: 43). Belkin (2012)
pays attention to male-​on-​male rape, homoerotic hazing, and other “bonding” activities
between male soldiers. Like Belkin, Paul Higate (2012) argues that the heteronormativ-
ity of military hazing is affirmed, not deconstructed, by a limited amount of homoerotic
interaction.
To understand this, then, one has to understand relationships between militarism and
masculinity, where full masculinity is often related to either willingness to engage in mili-
tary action or actual engagement in that action (e.g. Elshtain 1985; Tickner 1992; Sjoberg
2006). Once soldiers are members of militaries, standards of performance are often
enforced by feminization of under-​performers, and soldiers are encouraged to engage
in killing and life-​risking behaviour on a chivalrous logic of masculine responsibilities to
provide protection (Goldstein 2001; Young 2003). Men, then, are not just gender-​neutral
soldiers who happen to be men—​they are soldiers as men with expectations of mascu-
linity that influence both their engagement in militaries and their performance therein.
One of those expectations has more often than not been the expectation of heterosexu-
ality. The male “just warrior” (Elshtain 1985) is expected to defend his “beautiful soul”
woman (wife, daughter, mother) back “home,” and with her, other innocent women and
children (Enloe 1990). It is therefore expected that the male “just warrior” have a “beau-
tiful soul” back home, either in practice or in aspiration—​he is expected to be straight.
In fact, in the United States military, homosexuality was explicitly banned but officially
ignored-​until-​noticed under a 1993 policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (which replaced
a full ban) through 2011. While it was then formally illegal to be a US soldier and gay, the
penalty for homosexual behaviour arose only when such behaviour was caught.
The US military’s position on prostitution was, for a long time, less clear than its pos-
ition on homosexuality. While, regardless of the level of ban, the US military’s position
on homosexuality had largely been derogatory and/​or exclusive, its response to prostitu-
tion (especially outside the US borders) had not been as negative. In fact, as Moon (1997)
noted, there have been a number of times that the US military has explicitly endorsed
and/​or demanded the legality of prostitution. While the US military declared an official
ban on prostitution in 2008, many considered that to be a reversal of then-​existing pol-
icy, and many suggest that not a lot of progress has been made living up to that ban.
This makes one of the differences between male prostitution and female prostitu-
tion around military bases make more sense. While female prostitution is largely if not
exclusively civilian prostitutes servicing soldier clients, male prostitution finds a size-
able number of soldier prostitutes serving civilian clients as well. I suggest that the gen-
dered expectation of the straightness of dominant militarized masculinities channels
homoerotic behavior to the appearance of paid labour.
Historians who have studied male members of the US military prostituting them-
selves in the 1950s and 1960s focused heavily on definitions of straightness and gay-
ness—​where men who took money for sex with other men were more likely to be
identified as straight than men who had sex with other men without money being
92   Laura Sjoberg

exchanged, and men who were “tops” were more likely to be identified as straight than
men who were “bottoms,” regardless of whether money changed hands. In other words,
a man taking money for sex with another man could use the money as cover to preserve
his straightness—​he was having sex with men for money and not for enjoyment—​which,
while it makes him a prostitute, does not make him gay. In discussions with soldiers who
have been involved in these acts, this distinction was important both in perception in
peer relationships and in perception about the possible consequences of the behaviour.
In other words, expectations about masculinity for men as men influences patterns
of sex-​for-​money exchanges between men on military bases—​patterns which cannot
be understood without understanding gendering as a verb. Militarized masculinity
is a particular sort of gendered expectation of men as men which structures political
and social rewards as varied as citizenship and honour. Understanding both individual
and collective efforts to deal with and live up to that expectation helps show how dif-
ferent patterns of prostitution arise among men and between men and women around
military bases.

Analysing Significations of Gender

and Sexuality

Gender matters in accounting for how these patterns in military prostitution come to be,
but it also matters in interpreting how and why these patterns are significant for either
descriptive or prescriptive theorizing of global politics. Enloe suggests that standing in
the middle of base towns can tell one about “the history of the relationship between mili-
tarism, sexuality, and military policy” (Enloe 2010: 50):

Track down the retired men who, when they were colonels, commanded this
base: how did they handle their troops’ sexual expectations in a way that maintained
town-​base harmony? [ . . . ] Ask local “respectable” women what neighborhoods they
still tell their daughters to avoid. [ . . . ] Have conversations with the women who
make their living working in bars and hotels; ask them what services off-​duty male
soldiers—​or sailors or airmen—​have expected. It will take a multipronged investi-
gation to piece together the town’s history of militarized prostitution—​and the deci-
sions the town has taken to create and maintain it. (Enloe 2000: 51)

These decisions taken mean that “together, ideologies of militarism and sexuality have
shaped the social order of military base towns and the lives of women in those towns”
(Enloe 2010: 51). Enloe (p. 52) explains that such prostitution is prevalent, and treated as
“simultaneously a resource and a threat.” This is because “masculinity of troops is [ . . . ]
deliberately created by militaries through the provision of prostitution and pornog-
raphy, which enable men to ‘other’ women” (Jeffreys 2008: 108). Jeffreys suggests that
this serves an important purpose, given that “the othering of women is fundamental
to basic training, in which men are accused of being women in order to toughen them
 Feminist International Political Theory    93

up.” The buying of prostituted women allows soldiers to “differentiate themselves from
women and to develop the aggressive masculinity which will enable them to kill others”
(Jeffreys 2008: 108–​9).
The gendered signification(s) of military prostitution where women are the prosti-
tutes and men are the purchasers of sexual services, then, are many—​where the “oth-
ered” woman signifies the defeated opponent, the excitement to fight, the person it is
desirable to screw but undesirable to be, and the inequality of the relationship between
soldiers and communities that they inhabit. While the military prostitution where men
(either soldiers or civilians) are the prostitutes may share some of those significations, it
also reveals others—​norms of compulsory heterosexuality for soldiers, homoerotic sub-
texts to sexuality and violence in militaries, and the contradictions and tensions between
expectations of militarized masculinities and soldiers’ lived experiences. The relative
invisibility of civilian male prostitutes suggests a comfort with the language of feminized
victimization and a difficulty dealing with the more complicated gender-​based stories
that would come with male prostitutes; the relative invisibility of male soldier prostitutes
suggests comfort dealing with militaries as consumers of sold sex alongside discomfort
with militaries as providers of sold sex. These dynamics tell us about the complexities of
the relationships between sexuality, gender, militarism, and conflict.
The utility of exploring gendered significations, however, is not limited to telling
us about what gender means in militarism. As feminist scholars have detailed, the co-​
constitution of gender and militarism is bidirectional, where militarized expectations of
gender matter for what expectations about gender are more generally. Looking at online
ads posted by male members of the US military selling sexual services, one of the more
frequently appearing predications is about the appealing nature of penetrating and/​or
being penetrated by soldiers in uniform. The signification of these advertisements is
that the idealized masculinity is military; therefore, penetrating a soldier in uniform is
a transgression of that masculinity; being penetrated by one is being fucked by it; both
are a fetishization of a particular masculinity read onto and thought about in a soldier.
This fetishization is readable by both the soldier engaging in the advertisement and the
soldier and/​or civilian responding to it.
Thinking about sex, gender, and global politics, then, is not just about asking about
sex/​gender as a noun (who is assigned what identity?) or as a verb (what genderings
are brought up with, make possible, or are made possible by, certain distributional lay-
outs of politics?), but also about understanding it as a logic (in what positions are actors
placed or understood as a result of gender and genderings, and what normative values
are assigned to it?).

Engaging the Implications

of Significations of Gender and Sexuality

Thinking about the normative value assigned to actors in the global political arena
based on relations and engaging normative possibility has been one of the strong suits
94   Laura Sjoberg

of feminist and gender work in IR. Feminist work in IR has began suggesting that all
IR theorizing is IPT theorizing—​that no work can escape either normative impact or
normative implication. Suggesting that work is either explicitly or implicitly political
theorizing—​that “feminism is a political theory that prioritizes protecting women from
harmful differential treatment” (Sjoberg 2006: 32)—​feminisms have been understood
to be both a political theory and a political movement.
This has led feminists in IPT to think about what it means that people, states, and even
behaviours associated with femininities in global politics are accorded less notice and
less value than people, states, and behaviours associated with masculinities. As V. Spike
Peterson (2010) has argued:

Not only subjects (women and marginalized men), but also concepts, desires, tastes,
styles, “ways of knowing” can be feminized—​with the effect of reducing their legitim-
acy, status, and value. Importantly, this devalorization is simultaneously ideological
(discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic) [ . . . ] This devalorization
normalizes—​with the effect of “legitimating” the marginalization, subordination,
and exploitation of feminized practices and persons [ . . . ] the “naturalness” of sex
difference is generalized to the “naturalness” of masculine (not necessarily male)
privilege, so that both aspects come to be taken-​for-​granted “givens” of social life.
(p. 19, emphasis original)

Feminist work in IPT, then, has come to critique the problematic manifestations of
gender as a signifier of both expected behaviour and value in the global political arena.
Expectations of men as men and of women as women exist, and are differentiated—​
feminist work suggests that both existence and differentiation are normatively problem-
atic. But it does not stop there. The normative problems relate to when we understand
both the existence and differentiation of those gender stereotypes as power relations.
When I suggest that gender is a power relation, I mean it in three senses: first, asso-
ciation with masculinities and association with femininities carries with it power for
the former and disempowerment; second, gender-​based expectations hold power over
social and political actors’ decision-​making; third, arrangement along gender-​based
hierarchies matters for position and distribution across a wide variety of axes in global
politics.
Recognizing these things, then, feminist IPT has had a political interest in finding
the margins in global politics and foregrounding them; in finding gender subordin-
ation and redressing it; and in seeing the intersections between sexisms, heterosexisms,
classisms, racisms, and colonialisms in global politics. This gives feminist IPT a critical
function—​looking for those axes of subordination in both global politics and in existing
political theories. This has led feminisms to provide critical approaches to emancipa-
tory theory (e.g. Basu 2011), just war theorizing (e.g. Sjoberg 2006; Peach 1994; Young
2003), democratic theory (Ackerly 2000), and a number of other approaches and pieces
of work in IPT. But it also gives feminist IPT space to formulate and reformulate ethical
approaches to studying and acting in global politics.
 Feminist International Political Theory    95

Feminist ethical formulations have not been uniform. As Susan Hekman has pointed
out, “even a cursory examination of the literature on feminist ethics reveals that there
is no single feminist moral theory.” Instead, a number of different feminist moral the-
ories share a desire to deconstruct the dominance of hegemonic masculinities in both
practising and theorizing what global politics is, how it works, and how it should work.
Accordingly, some feminist work in IPT has focused on care ethics, where care “is an
activity that pre-​supposes needs that a person cannot meet by him-​or herself where
needs are conventionally defined” (Dahl 2000: 477) and “can be both moral principle
and practice in global politics” (Robinson 1999: 31; see Chapter 42). Using care as an
emotional pull and care labour as an act, this approach suggests that ethics of care could
have “the capacity to transform our understanding of both morality and politics, and
ultimately, the relationship between them.” Other feminists in IPT have focused on
empathetic cooperation (Sylvester 1994; 2001). Empathy is the willingness to enter into
the feeling or spirit of something and appreciate it fully—​to hear others’ stories and be
transformed by our appreciation of their experiences (Sylvester 1994: 96).
While these different approaches and a number of other feminist approaches to ethics
in IPT use different principles, sometimes even towards different ends, what they share
is that they are “committed to re-​drawing the line between ethical and unethical in ways
that are not anchored in gendered relations of power” (Hutchings 2007: 91). What this
means is that feminist IPT shares a “need to interrogate and reflect upon the role of the
politics of gender in how the line between the ethical and unethical is drawn in prac-
tice as well as principle” (p. 91). As Hutchings (p. 91) explains, “this approach to ethics
in world politics shifts attention from the project of determining what is ethically right
[ . . . ] to the task of deconstructing the interconnection between gender and ethics.” In
other words, feminist interventions in IPT occur on three levels: trying to disconnect
ethical thinking about global politics from its gendered foundations, engaging in nor-
mative critique of gendered power structures in global politics, and engaging in norma-
tive critique of gender essentialisms in global politics.
So what does this mean for theorizing about male prostitution around militar-
ies? Well, first, it means no one thing for understanding, accounting for the normative
implications of, or ethnically analysing this phenomenon or others. Second, though, a
number of realizations and/​or implications can be drawn from the variety of feminist
analytical tactics and ethical positions in IPT. Feminist ethical work has critiqued the
securitization of sexuality, the normalization of conflict sexual violence in militarized
times and places, the instrumentalization of women’s bodies in the name of national
security, the slavery-​like conditions in which many sex workers who serve militaries live
and work, the prevalence of rape (along with STDs and other forms of abuse and torture)
that surround military prostitution—​all while engaging the gendered conditions of pos-
sibility of each of these situations surrounding military prostitution. We do not know
enough right now about male prostitution in and around militaries to know how many,
if any, of these dynamics it replicates. We can know about some of the ethical dynam-
ics surrounding specifically male prostitution (standards of militarized masculinity and
96   Laura Sjoberg

complex expectations/​layers of heterosexuality), but until further research is done, we

cannot know about all of them, or even have a real sense of the complex constellation
of ethical issues. Still, feminist IPT gives a roadmap to deal with the ethics of research-
ing, researching the ethics of, and possibly even dealing with on a policy level, even this
niche issue.

The Applicability of Feminist IPT?

When I suggest that feminist IPT can provide a roadmap for the ethics of researching
male military prostitution, I mean that it provides a set of questions and assumptions
that are important to think about and address—​what sex, sexual, and gender identities
are being assigned to people? What power dynamics do those sex, sexual, and gender
identities generate? What actors are assigned, assumed to have, or are expected to have
what traits associated with masculinities and femininities? What are the pressures and
effects that those assignments, assumptions, and expectations might have? How do the
logics of gender distribute relative power, resources, and/​or legitimation? Who benefits
from, and who is subordinated by, particular organizations along gender hierarchies?
Applying this set of questions to male military prostitution is an important part of
many feminist approaches to IPT, which understand that research has politics in the
questions it asks and the subjects it investigates—​and choose to carry with them the
politics of gender lenses, prioritizing seeing, understanding, and deconstructing gender
subordination. Feminist IPT, though, shows that these questions need not be applied
only to the subject matter of male military prostitution (or any other area of feminist
research), but can also be applied to the process of research. What gender dynamics are
going on in the standards set for research? In the methods assumed to be useful and
those assumed to be less useful? What assumptions about knowledge that we make are
associated with traits understood to be masculine (rationality, autonomy, independ-
ence, objectivity), privileged over traits associated with femininity (emotion, relational-
ity, interdependence, positionality) in the research process? How does this impact the
substance of the research? How does it impact the ethics of the research process?
The realization in feminist IPT that the approach is best equipped to supply process-​
based ethics for research and analysis—​an approach to how to think about ethics instead
of producing an ethical framework—​has implications for if and how feminist IPT is
applicable to the “real world” out there. If there are those who doubt the applicability of
IPT generally, certainly there are those who doubt the applicability of feminist IPT as a
subfield/​subset of IPT. If there are those who think that IPT takes risks compromising
its frameworks to engage with the messy complications of the “real world,” the concern
is all the more valid for feminist thinking, which would be faced with intervening in
necessarily gender-​unjust structures in piecemeal rather than directly transformative
ways. The example of research on male military prostitution raises both these potential
pitfalls. There is not a feminist ethical position on male military prostitution, even if
 Feminist International Political Theory    97

we currently had all the information required to formulate coherent ethical positions.
Further, any given situation is a small subset of interlaid matrices of gender injustice and
war injustice in militarized societies, the structures of which could not be dismantled
solely for the purpose of a pure, feminist ethical approach to male military prostitution.
Above and beyond either of those concerns, there is a concern for focus: it would be pol-
itically problematic, at least in my view, to give disproportionate attention to the level of
the problem of male military prostitution, especially with all the known ethical prob-
lems with, and humanitarian effects of, military-​related prostitution of women.
A process-​based understanding of feminist IPT provides both a potential way around
these problems and a potentially fruitful path to applicability. If feminist IPT is not
meant to provide answers to what’s right and what’s wrong about male military prostitu-
tion, but instead to provide a roadmap for ethical ways to research ethical implications
of sex, gender, sexuality, and their significations in that military prostitution, then the
process for approaching the policy problem is much like the process for approaching the
research problem.
Relatedly, there is not a position on how a feminist should approach issues of how glo-
bal politics works, or how it ought to work. Instead, feminist IPT provides a set of orien-
tations to guide the process of how to orient oneself towards these issues. It suggests
different ways of thinking about sex and gender, and different ways of applying consid-
erations of sex and gender to causal and constitutive analytical frameworks. Feminist
IPT can help analyse sex representation, gendered signification, gendered history, and
gendered power, among other dynamics.
The applicability of feminist IPT is, in Hutchings’s words, de-​coupling the gender and
ethics—​gender and research ethics, and gender and policy ethics. It aims to do that de-​
coupling by exploring the sexed and gendered assumptions that underlie how know-
ledge is produced about the subject and how produced knowledge is consumed and
acted on. A policy reaction to male military prostitution—​or even more mainstream
issues of security, economics, or the like—​could take as a guiding principle the divorce
of gender and ethics, representationally and substantively. That is both applicable and
operationalizable—​two potential indicators both of its success and its necessity.

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 Pa rt I I I

I N T E R NAT IONA L
J U ST IC E
 ­c hapter 8

Gl obal Distri bu t i v e
Ju stic e
Seven Theses about Facts and Empirical Research

Simon Caney

This chapter explores the relevance of facts and empirical enquiry for the normative
project of enquiring what principles of distributive justice, if any, apply at the global
level. Is empirical research needed for this kind of enquiry? And if so, how? As a starting
point we might observe that claims about global distributive justice often rest on factual
assumptions. For example, some argue that members of affluent countries have respon-
sibilities to eradicate poverty in developing countries because they caused it (Pogge
2008), whereas others are sceptical of the underlying factual claims (Risse 2005). Some,
such as Rawls, think that the extent to which societies succeed in promoting develop-
ment depends on their culture (Rawls 1999b), whereas, again, some may dispute the
empirical assumptions.
These examples show some ways in which an understanding of world politics and
global political economy might be relevant for the evaluation of competing theories
of global distributive justice. They are, however, far from exhaustive. In this chapter
I examine seven different ways in which facts about national, regional, and global polit-
ics (and hence empirical research into global politics) might inform accounts of global
distributive justice. I begin by examining two widely shared normative claims, both of
which would require the use of empirical data if they were to be endorsed. However,
I raise questions about both of these views (and thus call into question the case for the
role of empirical evidence that is grounded in these two views). I then outline five ways
in which, I claim, empirical evidence is crucial. A deep understanding of the nature of
global politics and the world economy (and thus empirical research on it) is, I submit,
needed: to grasp the implications of principles of global distributive justice; to evaluate
such principles for their attainability and political feasibility; to assess their desirability;
and, at a prior level, to conceptualize the subject matter of global distributive justice and to
formulate the questions that accounts of global distributive justice need to answer.1
104   Simon Caney

Thesis I: The Scope

of Distributive Justice

1. According to many, one important way in which factual considerations are decisive
concerns what is commonly termed the “scope of distributive justice,” where this phrase
refers to who is included within a scheme of distributive justice. To illustrate: many
people think that principles of distributive justice apply solely within states (Nagel 2005).
Others maintain that principles of distributive justice apply within nations (Miller 1995).
Still others maintain that some principles of distributive justice apply within trans-
national systems of cooperation such as the European Union. Finally, some hold that
principles of distributive justice apply at the global level (Beitz 1999; Caney 2005; Pogge
2008; see Chapter 9).
How might we determine which of these views is correct? Some hold the following
view:

(P1) The Associational Argument: The scope of some, or all, principles of justice
depends on the extent to which persons are members of certain social, economic or
political relationships.

Now if this is true then it follows that we should accept:

Thesis I: The Scope Claim. Identifying the scope of distributive justice requires empir-
ical evidence to determine which persons are members of the relevant social, eco-
nomic or political relationships.

To gain a fuller understanding of (P1) (and thus also the Scope Claim) we need to exam-
ine what social, economic, or political relationships might be said to be relevant to the
scope of distributive justice. I have defined (P1) in a broad and inclusive way because,
whilst many political theorists stress the relevance of membership in social, economic,
and political relationships to the scope of distributive justice, they employ different
concepts—​such as the “basic structure” (Rawls 1999: 6–​10) or “institutional schemes”
(Pogge 1989: 8)—​and they have different kinds of relationships in mind. Different asso-
ciational theories diverge on the question of which specific kinds of associations deter-
mine the scope of distributive justice, and thus would diverge as to what kinds of facts
they should think are relevant.
2. Consider, for example, Rawls’s claim that principles of distributive justice apply to a
“basic structure,” understood to refer to a system of rules and institutions that have a
major effect on people’s lives (Rawls: 1999a: 6–​7). Some who draw on this framework
argue that if this assumption is correct, then the scope of distributive justice is global
in nature, for there is now a global basic structure (Beitz 1999: pt III; Pogge 1989: pt III,
2008). What is at stake here is the extent to which all persons are members of a common
 Global Distributive Justice    105

system of interdependence where the fate of everyone is shaped by a common set of

rules and institutions. Beitz, for example, draws extensively on the literature about inter-
dependence in Political Theory and International Relations (1999: pt III). Pogge too is
keen to show, in his influential World Poverty and Human Rights (2008), that the pov-
erty that blights the world stems not from purely local factors but from the policies and
practices of affluent countries.
More recently, however, others have argued that other kinds of relationship matter.
Some, for example, emphasize the moral significance of coercion. They maintain that
the scope of distributive justice is determined by whether persons are subject to a com-
mon coercive power (Valentini 2011). Michael Blake, for example, has argued that all
persons throughout the world are entitled to attain a certain threshold standard of liv-
ing. However, he adds that egalitarian principles of distributive justice only apply among
those who are subject to a system of coercion, and he further argues that since we lack a
world state these egalitarian principles apply within the state but not at the global level
(Blake 2013). Nagel has defended a related but more radical view. He holds that prin-
ciples of distributive justice should operate within the state because the latter is a coer-
cive power that acts “in the name of ” its citizens (Nagel 2005: 121, 128, 129, 130, 138, 140,
142). Since there is no global analogue, he concludes that there are no global principles
of distributive justice, only humanitarian duties. Both views hold, then, that the scope
of some (or all) principles of distributive justice depends on who is subject to a system
of coercion. Hence both require us to examine the empirical evidence to see whether
there is a global coercive order in some sense, and thus whether there are egalitarian
principles of global distributive justice or not. Empirical data here is, thus, necessary to
determine the scope of distributive justice.
The same conclusion is affirmed by other thinkers who draw attention to other kinds
of relationships. For example, Andrea Sangiovanni (2007) holds that egalitarian prin-
ciples of justice only apply within systems of reciprocity, and since he holds that this
applies within the state but not globally, egalitarian principles of justice only apply
within the state. Global justice, on this view, does not require equality. However, as this
brief summary brings out, his argument against egalitarian principles of global distribu-
tive justice rests on the factual assumption that there is not a worldwide scheme of reci-
procity in the relevant sense.
On each of these views described so far, then, ascertaining the scope of some or all
principles of distributive justice requires an understanding of world politics and the glo-
bal economy.

3. Should we endorse (P1) and thus the Scope Claim about the relevance about facts to
debates about global distributive justice? It is not possible in the space available to do just-
ice to all the reasons that one might have for endorsing (P1). It is, however, worth draw-
ing attention to one widely recognized problem, namely, that none of the arguments that
have been presented so far for the various associational theories (whether their emphasis
is on coercion or reciprocity or something else) has succeeded in showing that egalitarian
or other principles of distributive justice apply only where the relationships already exist.
106   Simon Caney

Consider, for example, Blake’s defence of the coercion view. It is worth unpacking the
argument more fully. Blake reasons thus:

The Coercion Argument:

(Pi) The state exercises coercion over its citizens (Blake 2013: 91–​3).
(Pii) Since coercion is prima facie wrong, the state has a duty to justify its policies to
those subject to its coercive power (Blake 2013: 93–​4).
(Piii) The state’s justification of its coercive power requires egalitarian principles of
distributive justice (Blake 2013: 95–​97).
(Piv) There is no coercive body at the global level (Blake 2013: 97–​8).
From this, Blake infers that:

(C) Egalitarian principles of distributive justice do not apply at the global level. They
only apply at the state level.

However, the relevant point to note here is that, as many have observed, the conclusion
does not follow from the premises.2 At most, this argument shows that one reason one
might think that equality is justified does not apply at the global level: it does not show
that no reason does. (Pi)–​(Piii) give us no reason to think that egalitarian principles of
distributive justice only apply between persons who are both subject to coercion; and
accordingly (Pi)–​(Piv) give us no reason to think that there are no egalitarian principles
of global distributive justice.
The same point can be made about other associational theories. Consider
Sangiovanni’s argument.

The Reciprocity Argument:

(Pi) States provide a legal framework and a set of opportunities that enable people
to develop (Sangiovanni 2007: 25–​6).
(Pii) If persons benefit from others, then they are under a duty of reciprocity to give
back to the system that has benefited them: they owe society a “fair return”
(Sangiovanni 2007: 26–​7).
(Piii) The duty of reciprocity owed to one’s fellow citizens requires an egalitarian
principle of justice.

Sangiovanni’s thought is that since citizens receive benefits from their state, then they
have a duty of justice to reciprocate and pay back their debts to their co-​citizens, and this,
he surmises, means sharing out benefits between co-​citizens on an equal basis. Since
persons are not, so Sangiovanni maintains, part of a global system of reciprocity, then
the analogous reason does not apply at the global level. Sangiovanni concludes, on this
basis, that global egalitarianism is false, and that equality only applies within the state.
Again, however, it is worth noting that the argument given above does not entail that
egalitarian principles of justice cannot apply outside a scheme of reciprocity. All that
 Global Distributive Justice    107

(Pi)–​(Piii) entail is that if there is reciprocity then egalitarian justice applies among the
co-​operators. It does not show that egalitarian justice applies only if there is reciprocity
(Caney 2011).
4. To sum up so far, then: some hold that the scope of principles of distributive justice
is determined by the extent to which there are existing social, economic, and political
relationships of a certain type, and thus hold that facts about the extent to which these
apply at the national or transnational or global level are crucial to determining the scope
of justice. I have argued that we lack reason to endorse such strong associational claims
about the scope of distributive justice.
Does this show that empirical data is irrelevant for determining the scope of distribu-
tive justice? No. That would be a non sequitur. Such data may be relevant if we appeal to
the principle that “ought implies can.” The argument would run as follows: Since “ought
implies can,” agents can have duties of justice to others only if they can affect them in
some way. From the point of view of “ought implies can,” the scope of distributive just-
ice is not determined by whether there are existing social relationships, but by whether
it is the case that either there are such relationships or there could be. Suppose that there
is a remote island that is cut off from humanity; but suppose further that it is possible
to assist the inhabitants of that island. In such a case, according to the “ought implies
can” principle, outsiders could be under duties of justice to the inhabitants (even though
there are no existing relationships with them) because it is possible for them to assist
islanders. Facts, thus, can matter to the question of the scope of justice even if they do
not play the central role ascribed to them by theorists like Beitz, Blake, and Sangiovanni.

Thesis II: Facts and the Content

and Justification of Principles of
Distributive Justice

1. Having discussed the scope of distributive justice, I turn now to a second area in which
factual considerations might be thought to be central. Recently some have argued that
the content of principles of distributive justice is shaped, at least in part, by the nature of
existing social practices (James 2012; Ronzoni 2009; Sangiovanni 2008). They adhere to
what Sangiovanni terms a “practice-​dependent” approach to distributive justice, where
this holds that “[t]‌he content, scope, and justification of a conception of justice depends
on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern”
(Sangiovanni 2008: 138). So, on this view, what principles of global justice apply in any
given situation depends on what social practices there are. Thus the principles for inter-
national trade will depend on the nature of the social practice of international trade.
Similarly, the principles for climate change governance will depend on the existing prac-
tices surrounding the protection of the climate system. The general point, then, is that on
this approach the content of justice depends on the character of existing social practices.
108   Simon Caney

Furthermore, practice-​dependent theorists argue, the derivation of these principles

requires the interpretation of the nature and point of the social practice (Sangiovanni
2008: esp. 142ff.).
Now if the practice-​dependent view is correct, then facts about the global economy
and international practices have deep moral significance. For to apply this view we
have to identify what social practices there are and what their nature and underlying
goals are; and this requires empirical research. As Sangiovanni makes clear, the prac-
tice-​dependent approach requires description and interpretation of social practices—​
detailing, for example, the rules, conventions, norms, and institutions that constitute the
practice, and the underlying values, goals, and normative commitments (Sangiovanni
2008, 142–3).
With all this in mind, we can now formulate a second thesis. Some hold the following
view:

(P1) The Practice-​Dependent Argument: The content of some, or all, principles of

justice depends on the nature of existing social practices.

Now if this is true then it follows that we should accept:

Thesis II: The Content Claim. Identifying the content of global principles of distribu-
tive justice requires empirical evidence to determine the nature and point of existing
international social practices.

2. Given this, it is of paramount significance to know whether we should accept the

starting point, namely (P1). Should we attribute normative significance to existing social
practices? Such a position is not obviously correct. Why ascribe such moral relevance to
the social practices that exist in our world? After all, if we reflect on the genesis of these
practices we can see good reason to be sceptical of their normativity. Existing social
practices are highly likely to reflect the interests of participants over and above non-​
participants, and within the category of participants they are surely likely to bear the
imprint of the powerful rather than the marginalized. Sangiovanni (2008) and other
practice-​dependent theorists like James (2012) are keen to argue that there is more to
their approach than interpretation. However, to the extent that interpretation plays a
role, it will be problematic if the raison d’être of the practice privileges insiders and the
powerful.
Those who employ a practice-​dependent approach have often not given direct argu-
ments in favour of their approach, preferring to put their theory into practice (James
2012; Ronzoni 2009). One exception is Sangiovanni. In his influential paper “Justice and
the Priority of Politics to Morality” Sangiovanni appeals to the “priority of politics,” and
claims that a practice-​dependent approach is superior because it recognizes the import-
ance of politics and the historical processes by which order is secured (Sangiovanni
2008). A practice-​independent approach, Sangiovanni maintains, stands free from the
contingent “arbitrary historical contingency,” and thus cannot recognize the normative
 Global Distributive Justice    109

significance of the political process (Sangiovanni 2008: 158). What does this mean?
Sangiovanni’s reasoning unfolds as follows.
First, he begins by saying that practice-​dependent accounts recognize the importance
of political “order”:

The first aim of any social or political institution is to secure conditions of order,
trust, cooperation, and security among human beings. Political authority is neces-
sary because without it, distrust, insecurity, and the desire for recognition—​“you
must recognize that our party is justified and therefore submit”—​will thwart any
possibility of cooperation or render it incredibly fragile. (Sangiovanni 2008: 157)

Depending on how we interpret the notion of a “first aim,” there need be nothing here
that a practice-​independent theorist should disagree with. Assuming that what is
meant by these terms is that we need first to secure order and stability (in a chrono-
logical or temporal sense) because, and to the extent that, this is needed to realize some
further goal, then this claim is uncontroversial. Someone who holds that the content
of principles of justice need not be derived from existing practices can accept that it is
important to “secure conditions of order, trust, cooperation, and security” (Sangiovanni
2008: 157) first.
In the ensuing discussion Sangiovanni then introduces a second, different point. He
says that a practice-​dependent theorist recognizes the normative significance of the pol-
itical process, but that

[t]‌he practice-​independent theorist, on the other hand, believes that the way in
which actual political institutions solve the first political question—​and hence how
questions of justice emerge within specific institutions—​is irrelevant to the justi-
fication and formulation of a conception [of—​SC] justice. The task of the theorist
of justice is to look beyond arbitrary historical contingency, and seek a general and
overreaching view. (Sangiovanni 2008: 157–​8)

Sangiovanni’s claim here, then, seems to be that practice-​independent theorists must

dismiss the existing political practices and conventions which are employed to deal with
the first political question as not relevant for the nature of justice.
A practice-​independent theorist can, however, make two replies. One is to enquire
why we should ascribe normative significance to the political process. Sangiovanni
writes: “Once we have the circumstances of politics in focus, it becomes clear why it
is a mistake to conceive of political and social institutions solely as instruments in the
realization of justice” (2008: 158). But it is not at all clear why it is a mistake to con-
ceive of political and social institutions solely as instruments in the realization of justice.
Sangiovanni’s argument here rests upon an unargued assumption.
At this point, however, someone might argue that the political process does have
normative significance because it reflects the choices and agreements made by differ-
ent political actors. I think that this is a promising line of argument. However, it is one
110   Simon Caney

that a practice-​independent theorist can make. Sangiovanni assumes in the above argu-
ment that practice-​independent approaches are entirely forward-​looking and adopt
an exclusively “instrumental” approach. However, there is no reason why a practice-​
independent theorist cannot adopt a voluntarist approach. Consider for example the
following principle:

The Consent Principle: Justice requires that people’s contracts should be honored
subject to:
(a) conditions that need to be met for contracts to be binding; and
(b) normative constraints on what people can or cannot commit themselves to.

This principle is a practice-​independent principle, for it ascribes no deep significance

to all existing social practices in and of themselves. It does not instruct us to inter-
pret any or all existing social practices for their telos. It simply holds that, made under
certain conditions and hedged in by certain normative constraints, what political act-
ors agree to has normative implications, and can create rights and responsibilities. As
such it is a practice-​independent principle. With this in mind, there is no reason why
a practice-​independent theorist cannot attribute moral significance to the political
process (and so “the way in which actual political institutions solve the first political
question”).
Reflecting on the Consent Principle further brings out the importance of a practice-​
independent approach. For if we are to ascribe normative significance to what people
or governments agree to—​the promises they make, and the undertakings they commit
themselves to—​then, as I have mentioned above, this requires that they have a genuine
choice. This, in turn, requires some practice-​independent conditions—​such as rights
of freedom of choice, information, and expression, as well as socioeconomic rights
to be met (condition (a) above). Moreover, there are moral limits on what people are
empowered to agree to (condition (b) above). They cannot, for example, make polit-
ical settlements that are committed to acts of aggression against innocent neighbour-
ing peoples or to colonial expansion. The appeal to political process thus brings out the
importance of practice-​independent principles of justice.
We reach the following conclusion. Sangiovanni maintains that practice-​independent
principles are flawed, for they do not recognize the normative significance of the polit-
ical process and the political agreements reached to answer the question of order. I have
argued that we have not been given reason to endorse this claim; and, moreover, the
best explanation of the normative significance of political processes draws on a practice-​
independent principle (the Consent Principle) and requires—​ to be normatively
binding—​a set of background rights and limits.
The upshot of this, then, is that we have yet to be given a reason to accept the practice-​
dependent contention that justice requires conforming to the values given by existing
social practices. Given this (and without any other further argumentation), we lack
reason to accept the second thesis. If Sangiovanni were right, we would have good rea-
son to think that identifying principles of justice requires an empirical and interpretive
 Global Distributive Justice    111

enquiry into the nature of the social practices that exist at the transnational and global
level. However, we have yet to be given compelling reasons to accept the starting point.
Having criticized two accounts of the ways in which an understanding of global pol-
itical and economic relations bear on our account of global distributive justice, I now
wish to draw attention to five ways in which empirical considerations about the nature
of global political and economic relations are pivotal for determining the nature of glo-
bal distributive justice.

Thesis III: Application of Principles

of Distributive Justice to
the Global Context

First, and least controversially, factual considerations will normally be necessary to gain
a full understanding of the practical implications of principles of global distributive
justice. Many principles of distributive justice are such that we can only know what they
entail in practice if we have a good understanding of the empirics.
To see this, consider one of the leading theories of global justice—​Thomas Pogge’s
account of global justice and the duty to eradicate global poverty. Pogge’s argument
starts from the normative assumption that agents are under a negative duty not to
uphold and maintain institutions that harm others. Harm, for Pogge, is defined in
terms of causing human rights deficits that are foreseeable and known to be avoidable
at reasonable cost (Pogge 2008: 26). We might call this his “fundamental moral prin-
ciple.” He then adds the empirical claim that the citizens and governments of affluent
countries systematically violate this negative duty, and that this results in global pov-
erty. On the basis of his fundamental moral principle and his empirical claims, Pogge
then reaches what we might term “derivative moral conclusions” concerning who
has the duty to eradicate global poverty. Now as this makes clear, Pogge’s conclusion
depends on whether his claims about the causes of global poverty are correct or not.
If these factual assumptions are incorrect, then his argument does not establish his
conclusion.
Given this we have good reason to accept the following:

Thesis III: The Application Thesis. What implications principles of fundamental dis-
tributive justice have depends on facts about world politics and the global economy.

To understand what global distributive justice requires in reality at a concrete level thus
requires empirical research into the implications of the core fundamental principles of
global distributive justice.
Political theorists thus need to consult the work of scholars such as Paul Collier (2007)
and John Gallup, Jeff Sachs, and Andrew Mellinger (1999), who argue that the extent of
112   Simon Caney

a country’s development depends on geographical factors (such as whether a country

is landlocked and whether its climate leaves it more vulnerable to disease and reduced
agricultural productivity). And they need to engage also with the work of Daron
Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2002) on the effects of colonialism on
contemporary standards of living in former colonies, as well as with Acemoglu, Johnson,
and Robinson’s argument (2001) that different environmental conditions led colonial
powers to adopt different kinds of strategy (essentially creating extractive institutions
in hostile climates and inclusive ones in more hospitable climates), and that this has led
to differential standards of living today.3 They need to consider the emphasis on “insti-
tutions” given by Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, and Francesco Trebbi (2004); as
well as the arguments of Joel Mokyr (2017) (who emphasizes culture as a determinant
of development); and the emphasis on geography made by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000)
(who argues that the great divergence between China and Europe arose in part because
of Europe’s good luck—​what Pomeranz calls a “geographic accident” (2000: 62)—​in
having extensive coal reserves in Britain.4

Thesis IV: Evaluation for Possibility

and Political Feasibility

If we reflect on Thesis III then we are led, I think, to consider two further ways in which
factual considerations about the world economy play a crucial role for theorizing about
global distributive justice. The first concerns the extent to which given principles are
attainable (by which I mean possible to achieve). Suppose that one endorses a certain
principle of global distributive justice, P. Suppose further that we then consider what
it would take to apply this principle, we might discover that it is impossible to realize P.
Suppose, for example, someone holds that all current and future persons are entitled to
enjoy the consumption patterns of a contemporary affluent American citizen. And, sup-
pose that that lifestyle is ecologically unsustainable in the sense that, if everyone seeks
to enjoy that standard of living now, it will result in such high greenhouse gas emissions,
and ecological harm more generally, that many people in the future cannot enjoy the
same standard of living. In such a case, the proposed principle of global (and intergen-
erational) justice asks for what is unattainable. Here factual considerations reveal that
what the theorist calls for is impossible, and hence they call for a revision of the initial
principle, P (Caney 2012).
Thus far I have been conceiving of “possibility” and “attainability” simply to mean
“it could be achieved (even if it is very unlikely).” Suppose, however, that our focus
is on campaigning for change in our very non-​ideal world. In such circumstances we
might think that focusing on what is possible is not that useful: rather our focus should
be on what is politically feasible. The concept of political feasibility is complex and
needs elucidation (see Chapters 31 and 48). I here use it in the following rather rough
 Global Distributive Justice    113

sense: political proposals are politically feasible to the extent that agents are motivated
to bring about the reforms, and if they seek to do so they are likely to succeed.5 I do not
think that it is a necessary condition of a political principle being correct that it is pol-
itically feasible. (A practice of killing young women whose conduct departs from com-
munal norms is unjust no matter how politically infeasible it might be to change it.)
Nonetheless, one might reasonably hold that if we are to campaign for a specific policy
or set of proposals, then we should care, among other things, about which is the most
politically feasible.
With these two notions on hand, we can now formulate a fourth thesis,

Thesis IV: The Possibility and Feasibility Claim. The extent to which (a) principles of
global distributive justice can be realized and (b) policies that further global distribu-
tive justice are politically feasible can only be ascertained on the basis of empirical
research.

Again, facts play a crucial role, and empirical political research, on both what is in prin-
ciple possible and the prospects for reform and change, is essential.

Thesis V: Evaluation for Desirability

If we return now to Thesis III, we can see a further way in which factual considerations
about the global economy can play a significant role in theorizing about global distribu-
tive justice. For when we analyse the empirical implications of realizing a principle P, we
may discover that that principle has, in practice, undesirable side effects that cast doubt
on the principle. Suppose, for example, that the only way to secure global equality is to
institute a world state, and suppose further that this would be intolerant. We might in
light of this revise the initial moral commitment to global equality. I do not endorse the
factual assumption made here, but that is not to the point: the point is that if we examine
what is required to realize a given principle, then we may learn of harmful side effects
which are such that we now have reason to reject or qualify our endorsement of the first
principle.
Alternatively, we might find that P has desirable side effects that make aiming for P
even more desirable than we thought. To give an example: policies for mitigating dan-
gerous climate change may have co-​benefits (such as cleaner air because there are more
efficient motor vehicles). In both cases, we can only ascertain this by engaging in an
empirical analysis of what realizing P would entail in practice. In the light of this we
should endorse:

Thesis V: The Desirability Claim. The extent to which a proposed principle of glo-
bal distributive justice is desirable can only be ascertained on the basis of empirical
research.
114   Simon Caney

Thesis VI: Formulation of Questions

The three preceding theses have focuses on what answers we might arrive at—​i.e. the
nature, possibility, feasibility, and desirability of proposed principles. However, empir-
ical research is also needed at a prior stage, namely the construction of the questions. The
sixth thesis about the role of empirical research that I propose to examine concerns what
we might term the “formulation of questions of global distributive justice.” An adequate
formulation of the questions that should be at the heart of the study of global distribu-
tive justice must, I submit, be informed by empirical research.
To see why, note two problems that may arise if those engaged in international pol-
itical theory are unaware of the empirical research on the global economy. The first is
the problem of badly formulated questions. By this I mean questions that mischaracter-
ize the normative issues and misconceive what is at stake. To give an example, suppose
that someone is concerned about the fact that some in the world have dire prospects for
leading healthy lives. And suppose that her response to this is to focus on how to dis-
tribute health care equitably—​her assumption being that this will address the problem.
Suppose, however, that, as many argue, the factors that determine people’s level of health
are not the amount of health care spent on people but the so-​called “social determinants
of health” (where these include disparities in power, wealth, and income).6 In such a
case, her question is a badly formulated one because it misunderstands what is at stake.
It only makes sense given empirical assumptions that do not in fact hold. Her question
tacitly presupposes an understanding of the world that turns out to be inaccurate.
A second problem with conducting research into global distributive justice without a
deep grasp of the facts about the global economy is the problem of unasked questions.
In particular, emerging problems can be missed without a good grasp of the changing
nature of the world economy.
In light of these two arguments, we reach the following conclusion:

Thesis VI: Formulation of questions. The formulation of questions concerning the

nature of global distributive justice should be informed by empirical research into
the nature of the world economy.

Thesis VII: Conceptualization of

the Subject Matter

We can, and should, go further than this. My last thesis concerns the prior question of
how we conceptualize the subject matter of global distributive justice. At stake is the
question of how we individuate the topics to which principles of global distributive
justice apply. Some adopt what I have termed an “integrationist” view which applies
 Global Distributive Justice    115

principles of global distributive justice to all major socioeconomic burdens and bene-
fits considered together. Others, however, have adopted what I term an “isolationist”
approach, and have treated certain topics—​like trade or climate or development—​in
isolation from each other. That is, they maintain that there are principles of justice that
apply specifically to climate change, say, and that this should be done by bracketing out
other concerns (Caney 2012).
Now what stance one takes on this issue will be guided, at least in part, by empir-
ical factors. This holds for two reasons. First, whether it makes sense to treat a topic
(like international trade, say) in isolation depends to some extent on whether it consti-
tutes a relatively autonomous realm of activity. The less it does, the less plausible is the
claim that it constitutes a specific domain that should be governed by its own principles.
Furthermore, only through empirical enquiry can we determine whether it is relatively
freestanding or is simply one part of a wider set of relationships.
Second, some have argued for an isolationist approach on pragmatic grounds.7 They
maintain that there is so much disagreement about what constitutes global justice in
general that if we tried to treat an issue (such as trade justice) in conjunction with other
issues (such as global poverty, labor rights, gender inequalities, ownership of natural
resources, human rights, and climate change), then we would reach deadlock. Treating
trade in light of a general theory of global distributive justice, on this argument, would
preclude getting anything done at the international level. For this reason we should treat
separate issues in isolation.
Now, again, whether this is a good argument or not depends on its empirical prem-
ise that treating issues in isolation facilitates securing agreement; and thus determining
whether this is true requires looking at the empirical literature on linkages (e.g. Sebenius
1984: ch. 6; Caney 2012: 278ff.).
In light of these two arguments, we reach the following conclusion:

Thesis VII: Conceptualization of the subject matter. The conceptualization of the sub-
ject matter of global distributive justice should be informed by empirical research
into the nature of the world economy.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have argued against two ways in which one might think that the facts
play a central role. I have challenged the assumption that the scope of global distributive
justice is defined by social, economic, and political relationships, and hence the claim
that empirical research is needed to establish whether these relationships exist at the
global level or not (Thesis I). And I have challenged the assumption that which prin-
ciples of justice are correct should be determined by an empirical investigation into the
nature of social practices (Thesis II). I have, however, argued that empirical research is
required to ascertain the practical implications of principles of global distributive justice
116   Simon Caney

(Thesis III), the possibility and political feasibility of principles of global distributive
justice (Thesis IV), as well as their desirability (Thesis V). Furthermore, I have argued
that a good empirical grasp of the nature of the global economy is required both to guide
the formulation of the questions we ask about the world economy (Thesis VI) and also
to enable us to have an adequate conceptualization of the subject matter of global dis-
tributive justice (Thesis VII).

Notes
1. It is perhaps worth noting that none of the five theses that I defend is incompatible with
G. A. Cohen’s arguments to the effect that there are fact-​independent principles (Cohen
2008: 6).
2. This point is one that has often been made against Blake’s earliest work on coercion
(2001: 257–​96). See e.g. Abizadeh (2007: 353–​6), Caney (2008: 502–​3), Gilabert (2012: 172),
and Moellendorf (2009: 25).
3. More generally, see Acemoglu and Robinson’s work (2012) on the role of “inclusive” and
“extractive” institutions.
4. Philosophical treatments of global distributive justice rarely engage with such sources. One
exception is Risse (2005), which engages with a number of these.
5. This account is very rough. For a much more developed account see Stemplowska (2016).
6. For information see http://​www.who.int/​social_​determinants/​en/​.
7. This argument has been given in the context of climate change by Meyer and Roser
(2006: 239).

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Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism. The Monist 94(4): 506–​34.
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Caney, S. (2012). Just Emissions. Philosophy & Public Affairs 40(4): 255–​300.
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University Press.
 ­c hapter 9

Real-​W orld G l oba l

Egalitaria ni sm

Darrel Moellendorf

Thirty years ago there was no sub-​discipline of political theory called “international
justice.” Charles Beitz’s hugely influential book Political Theory and International
Relations had been published (Beitz 1979). And there was a scattering of important pub-
lications by Brian Barry, Thomas Pogge, Henry Shue, and others (Barry 1981, 1982; Pogge
1988; Shue 1980). But the main normative debates in political theory were about issues
of domestic justice. The end of the Cold War, the increasing globalization of trade and
investment, increasing appeals to human rights in foreign policy, and the broadening of
appreciation of the existence of a major global ecological crisis helped to bring about a
significant change in the interests of many people working in political theory, especially
young people. The rise of international justice to a major area of focus in political the-
ory, then, seems to be the result of the discipline responding to major changes that made
clear the importance of issues of justice between states and between people across state
borders (see Chapter 11). One important way in which International Political Theory
(IPT) connects to international practice, then, is by responding to questions posed by
political and social developments.
Hegel famously claimed that theory always follows events: “When philosophy paints
its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only rec-
ognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only at
the onset of dusk” (Hegel 1991: 23). In contrast, Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach has a
much more ambitious role for philosophy: not just to interpret the world but to change
it (Marx 1972: 145). The explosion of normative theorizing about international justice in
the last two decades not only tracks developments in the world but, in virtue of being
normative, has posed important questions regarding whether and how the world should
be changed. And any credible account of how the social and political institutions or pol-
icies should be changed will have to rely on information from the social sciences both
about how existing institutions work and about how new ones might work. This chap-
ter presents an account of global justice that is both empirically rooted and critical of
 Real-World Global Egalitarianism    119

existing practices and arrangements. It is an account that requires the input of empirical
social science in order to support the claim of duties of egalitarian distributive justice.
It is in that sense necessarily sensitive to empirical conditions. And it also can lend sup-
port to recommendations that policies and institutions should be changed so as to pro-
mote greater equality globally.

Global Inequality

The World Bank identifies two goals to be of the utmost importance. The first echoes
the first Sustainable Development Goal: to end extreme poverty. The second, however,
is to promote shared prosperity as a mean of addressing inequality (World Bank 2016).
How unequal is the world? Across various measures there is deep, persistent, and in
some cases growing global inequality. A recent study conducted by Oxfam found that by
2016 the combined wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population reached an
amount greater than the combined wealth of the remaining 99 per cent. Recently, glo-
bal inequality of wealth has been growing. In 2016 the richest 1 per cent’s share of wealth
was over 50 per cent, while in 2009 it was about 44 per cent (Oxfam 2016). Within the
wealthiest group there is also an incredible concentration of wealth. Thomas Piketty
estimates that the wealthiest 0.1 per cent owns about 20 per cent of all wealth globally
(Piketty 2014: 438) and he conjectures that their wealth has grown 6–​7 per cent per year
over the past three decades (p. 435). These can only be rough conjectures based on uncer-
tain evidence, because the wealthy resist having their treasure officially documented.
Although wealth inequality is an important measure of private power differentials,
there are other measures of inequality with moral salience. For example, global health
inequalities are deep. According to the World Health Organization, the average life
expectancy in low-​income countries is just 57 years, while in high-​income countries it is
80 years: one gets an average life-​bonus of about 23 years just for living in a high-​income
country. Children in the poorest quintile globally are nearly twice as likely to die before
their fifth birthday than children from the richest quintile (WHO 2001). Inequalities in
education are also bleak. In the wealthiest countries almost no one aged 20–​24 has less
than four years of schooling. In many of the poorest countries of the world, the major-
ity of the population of that age has had less than four years of schooling. In Niger, the
worst case, fully 78 per cent of the population aged 20–​24 has had less than four years of
schooling (WIDE 2016).
Not all political theorists condemn global inequality as an injustice. Thomas Nagel
argues that the circumstances of justice do not exist globally. We cannot condemn exist-
ing inequality or even poverty as unjust, but the latter is nonetheless deplorable on
humanitarian grounds (Nagel 2005). Many others argue that the deprivations at the bot-
tom end of global inequality are morally objectionable, but inequality as such is not.
Some condemn global poverty on human-​rights grounds (Pogge 2002). And among
those theorists who think that judgements of distributive justice apply globally, and who
120   Darrel Moellendorf

are committed to egalitarianism domestically, some argue that it is only poverty, not
inequality, that justice condemns (Blake 2001). Rawls argues that peoples have only a
duty of assistance to help other peoples who due to poverty are not able to form well-​
ordered societies (Rawls 1993; 1999).
There are various lines of disagreement among egalitarian political theorists. Some
argue that egalitarianism is not owed to everyone simply in virtue of their humanity,
but is on the contrary justified only within special social or political relations. For some
theorists, coercion is necessary (Blake 2001; 2011; Nagel 2005; Valentini 2011); for oth-
ers, reciprocity is required (Sangiovanni 2007). And sometimes the claim is that the
special conditions exist only within the state. Others favouring global justice argue that
justice necessarily applies to all persons in virtue of their humanity (Tan 2004; Caney
2005a; Gilabert 2011; 2012). Even some who affirm that humanity alone is a sufficient
condition for justice deny that principles of egalitarian distributive justice should guide
international institutions, because of the range of disagreement about those principles
(Caney 2006).

Membership-​Dependent
Cosmopolitanism

Two broad positions have been briefly surveyed: that egalitarian distributive duties exist
only between persons within institutional circumstances of the kind characterized by
the state, and that they exist between all persons of the world in virtue of their common
humanity. In this section I defend a third position, which holds that although egalitar-
ian duties require more than mere humanity, they exist nonetheless among all persons
globally as co-​members of a common economic association (Moellendorf 2009; 2011).
The humanity-​centred position might seem counterintuitive. If we imagine some
society with which we have no significant interaction, is it really plausible that we could
owe duties to its members to establish institutions securing egalitarian distributive just-
ice? Even if we do not, it does not follow that such duties do not exist between all persons
under contemporary conditions of globalization.
I begin with the assumption that persons have a morally basic duty of equal respect
to everyone. This is a pre-​institutional duty, and a basis of moral duties to everyone in
virtue of their common humanity. That need not entail that there are duties to estab-
lish institutions of egalitarian justice covering everyone. Membership dependence is the
view that duties of egalitarian social justice exist only among members of associations
of the required kind (Moellendorf 2009: 40). Membership dependence requires a cri-
terion or set of criteria that determine when associations are such that they give rise to
duties of social justice. The criteria that govern when such duties arise can plausibly be
adumbrated in the principle of “associational justice” (Moellendorf 2006: 608; 2009: 33).
People must be members of an association that satisfies the following four conditions: it
 Real-World Global Egalitarianism    121

must be (1) relatively strong, (2) largely non-​voluntary, (3) constitutive of a significant
part of the background rules for the various relationships of members’ public lives, and
(4) governed by norms subject to human control. There is no bright line distinguishing
when duties of justice are generated by associations. Not all are sufficiently strong, nor
do all generate effects with sufficient scope and force to structure a person’s membership
in public life, and nor do all render a person’s participation sufficiently non-​voluntary.
So application of the principle of associational justice requires considerable attention to
empirical detail.
If individuals are assumed not to owe duties of egalitarian distributive justice to all
persons, why would the above conditions establish duties of justice between some sub-
set of persons? Morally basic respect for human dignity is the basis of the account. Equal
respect for the inherent dignity of persons requires taking them as co-​authors of a com-
mon life. Respect constrains the rules of an association (Moellendorf 2006: 610). Persons
must be offered a justification, which in principle they could accept, for the rules of asso-
ciations, which satisfy the above conditions. There is no genuine co-​authorship absent
such a justification. This is the demand of “justificatory respect” (Moellendorf 2009: 11).
To impose rules that could not in principle be justified to those governed by them is to
disrespect those persons. It is to fail to treat them as co-​authors of the common associ-
ation. On the universalist basis of equal respect for the inherent dignity of everyone, jus-
tificatory respect establishes special duties of social justice.
Now, justificatory respect establishes a presumption of egalitarianism under the rules,
regardless of whether the rules are directed towards determining how to live together
in political community or towards how to distribute the goods and powers of our joint
efforts. For any rule that establish members of the association as possessing special priv-
ileges or powers will be initially suspect. This is not to claim that differences would be
impossible to justify on grounds of, say, need, desert, or advantage to the least advan-
taged; but no principle establishing powers on the basis the standing of one’s family,
social class, gender, or race will be plausible. Someone might assert entitlements to
wealth on the basis of a natural property right in their persons and products. Defeating
such claims requires saying much more about why the natural-​rights account employed
to defend entitlement fails. For now, we assume that natural-​rights accounts are not
compelling. The associations that we consider are “common-​good associations,” in the
sense that no one has a pre-​associational claim on the goods, powers, and opportunities
that the norms of the association assign.
The defence of an egalitarian presumption requires considering what members of an
association could justify to one another. For this reason it might be rejected out of hand
as an instance of what Amartya Sen calls “transcendental institutionalism” (Sen 2009).
Sen’s favoured alternative is a realization-​focused comparison, “interested primarily in
the removal of manifest injustice from the world” (p. 7). But in many important cases it is
not manifest injustice that concerns us. In a great many cases, such as global inequality,
whether there is an injustice is the most important question. A more sophisticate nor-
mative account is needed when the question is not how to remove manifest injustices
but whether particular institutional arrangements productive of inequality are unjust.
122   Darrel Moellendorf

Now consider whether the global economic association satisfies the conditions of the
principle of associational justice. The first condition concerns the strength of the asso-
ciation. There are various measures of the strength of an association, but the following
three seem relevant: the duration of the association, the comprehensive character of its
norms, and the effects of the association on the moral interests of its members. Strength
is a matter of degree. The longer the association has endured, the more comprehensively
it guides members’ lives, and the more profound the effects are on persons’ interests,
the stronger it seems to be. Let us consider, then, three characteristics of strength. First,
from early in the history of capitalist economic development there has been a tendency
in the direction of globalization. It has been observable since colonialism, but speeded
up in the second half of the twentieth century with technological changes. Second,
the global economic association is comprehensively governed by the norm of compe-
tition for market share. Firms must ceaselessly innovate and reduce production costs.
Moreover, norms governing most international trade are also in place through the regu-
latory framework of the WTO. Third, the globalization of trade, investment, and finance
has had profound effects on the highest-​order moral interests of persons. Export-​led
development strategies have produced significant gains for the human development
of some countries (Chang 2002). But job insecurity around the world has increased as
a consequence of globalization (Standing 1999). And as the Great Recession painfully
demonstrated, speculative international investing has increased the danger of general-
ized global economic crises.
The second condition of the principle of associational justice is non-​voluntariness.
An association is not non-​voluntary if there is no alternative at all to membership in it.
That would be unreasonably demanding. Rather, an association is non-​voluntary to the
extent that there is no reasonable alternative to participating in the association. Now,
although state leaders are formally free either to deepen engagement with the global
market or not, the fact that nearly every country in the world is a member of the WTO is
evidence that there is no reasonable alternative development path. Moreover, there is no
successful case of autarkic advanced economic development. The third condition is that
the association constitutes a significant part of the background rules for the various rela-
tionships of members. Whether one can find employment and under what terms is part
of that background affected by globalization. The fourth and final condition of the prin-
ciple of associational justice is that the association must be governed by norms that are
subject to human control. Market competition can be limited, directed, or counterbal-
anced by deliberate public policy; and WTO rules can in principle be amended. There is
no doubt that the global economic association satisfies this condition.

Egalitarian Reforms

A justified principle of egalitarian distributive justice will depend on the kind of asso-
ciation that exists and the policy options available. Different kinds of associations will
 Real-World Global Egalitarianism    123

distribute different goods, and quite possibly according to different egalitarian prin-
ciples. Political associations must aim for equal and inclusive political membership
(Moellendorf 2009: 54); and economic associations must aim for reciprocal relations
characterized by equality in productive, ownership, and distributive relations (pp. 58–​
61). Although global egalitarians are sometimes criticized for simply extending to the
globe principles of justice applicable in the state (Valentini 2011: 61), that is not a fea-
ture of the present account. On the contrary, both the principles of justice and the
goods they govern are likely to be different globally from how they are in the state,
according to the present account. If the capacity for governance is less well developed
globally than in the state, that will also affect the kind of principle parties are duty-​
bound to follow in institutional reform or development (Moellendorf 2009: 63–​7;
2011: 548–​51).
A defence of particular egalitarian principles for a partially globalized world would
be extensive (see Moellendorf 2009: 40–​68). Here I set that aside to focus on the theme
more central to practice. Which reforms to the global economic order might promote
equality? Empirical study also tells us how global egalitarianism could inform political
practice (see Chapters 8 and 9). Consider a very brief sketch of five kinds of egalitar-
ian reforms. The first reform would be to liberalize immigration policies in developed
countries. Immigration liberalization would advance the goal of equalizing opportun-
ities globally. Branko Milanovič’s studies of global income distribution demonstrate that
at least half the variability in a person’s global income percentile rank can be explained
by the level of human development and inequality of income in her country of birth
(Milanovič 2015). There seem then to be three means by which one’s income rank might
be improved if one were born in a country plagued with inequality and low levels of
human development. First, one could advance one’s career to receive greater than aver-
age remuneration in one’s country. Second, a country’s macroeconomic policy might
lead to human development improvements there. Finally, one might emigrate in search
of better income opportunities in more highly developed countries. Liberalizing immi-
gration policies would make the third option more widely available. It would not equal-
ize opportunities between people born in wealthy and poor countries, but it would
narrow the gap between unequal opportunities.
Liberalizing immigration policies would also be likely to bring material gains to
people who remain in the poor countries. According to a World Bank report, increased
immigration from developing to high-​income countries would increase the labour
force of the latter by 3 per cent from 2002 to 2025, and would generate large aggregate
increases in global welfare (World Bank 2006). When adjusted for prices, the increase
in aggregate global income would be $356 billion or 0.6 per cent. And the gains would
go disproportionately to developing countries, where incomes would increase by 1.8 per
cent, compared to 0.4 per cent in high-​income countries. The increased income would
result from decreased labour market competition (due to emigration) and increased
remittances (from those who have emigrated). In confirmation of Milanovič’s claim
about the value of emigrating, the World Bank also finds that there would be consider-
able gains to new immigrants in the high-​income countries. The cost-​of-​living-​adjusted
124   Darrel Moellendorf

income gains would increase on average by nearly 200 per cent, due primarily to differ-
ences in wages between the countries of origin and destination.
A second reform would be to prohibit IMF loan conditionality that requires labour
market liberalization. Often a country’s access to crisis assistance from the IMF has been
conditional on increasing retirement ages, weakening collective bargaining agreements,
lowering minimum wages, reducing unemployment benefits, and loosening firing pro-
cedures. About one quarter of all IMF loans between 1987 and 2012 required liberaliza-
tion (Caraway et al. 2012). The IMF justifies labour market liberalization as promoting
growth and employment (Fuceri et al. 2012). This justification is made primarily on the
basis of computer modelling exercises for the purpose of making long-​term prognoses,
despite the well-​known short-​term risks of increased unemployment, reduced growth,
and even recession.
Some analysts support IMF-​required liberalization as means by which to enhance
borrower credibility and lender confidence, the impact of which on growth and employ-
ment materialize over the medium-​to long-​term horizon (Barkbu et al. 2012). But even
if the medium-​term growth projections were certain, egalitarians would have reason to
reject liberalization policies because they tend to increase inequality within countries.
A regression analysis over a 32-​year period of a sample of 110 countries offers signifi-
cant evidence to this effect (Vreeland 2012: 121–​39). Liberalization programmes lead to
greater class polarization. Labour’s income decreases, while capital’s increases (p. 133).
A change to IMF policy, to prohibit making access to finance during economic crises
conditional on labour market liberalization, would be a gain for egalitarianism.
A third global reform would be for the WTO to require sequencing trade liberaliza-
tion in order to support developing countries. A central aim of the WTO is to liber-
alize multilateral trade. And although WTO agreements often give greater adjustment
time to less developed countries, nonetheless the WTO does not require sequencing
trade liberalization such that developed countries must reduce their trade barriers first.
Historical evidence suggests that achieving significant economic development requires
that developing countries support and protect their industries, especially industries
producing for export. Ha-​Joon Chang argues that Japan and the newly industrialized
countries of East Asia all recently followed the well-​established strategy of infant indus-
try protection pursued some time ago by North America and Europe (Chang 2002). As
we have noted, Milanovič defends the importance to an individual’s income of the level
of human development of her country of birth. Hence, a trade regime that promoted
development by allowing developing states to protect and support their infant indus-
tries would also promote more equal opportunities for income among persons regard-
less of their country of origin.
Unlike the previous three reforms, the fourth aims to redistribute from the global rich
to the global poor by means of a new tax facility. The Financial Transaction Tax or Tobin
Tax was initially proposed by James Tobin as a disincentive to international currency
speculation (Tobin 1982: 43). The Financial Transaction Tax targets short-​term specu-
lative investments in international money markets. Currency speculation can produce
wild fluctuations in the value of currencies in developing countries. Such fluctuations
 Real-World Global Egalitarianism    125

can affect the ability of a country to export its goods, to pay for imports, and to pay
its debts. One potential benefit of an appropriately designed Financial Transaction Tax
would be the protection of the development aims of poor countries by softening fluc-
tuations caused by currency speculations. Insofar as no great social good is served by
short-​term currency speculation, if the tax can be fine-​tuned in a way that does not deter
long-​term investment, it would be morally costless.
Tobin and colleagues also suggest that the proceeds that the tax generated could be
used for global poverty reduction (Eichengreen et al. 1995: 161–​72). A very low tax could
be effective in generating considerable revenue. Experiments thus far, however, do not
offer full support for the effectiveness of the tax. A Swedish tax on the sale and pur-
chase of equity securities and fixed-​income securities was dropped after a few years
because revenues were low and the volume of trading had declined significantly. But the
explanation of these outcomes is disputed (Wroebel 1996). A possible European-​wide
experiment would be more instructive. Initially eleven EU states agreed to implement
a financial transaction tax in early 2016 under an EU provision known as “enhanced
cooperation.” But Estonia pulled out and Belgium and Estonia began expressing serious
reservations. Under the plan at least nine participants are required. The June 2016 dead-
line for an agreement about the plan came and went. Although more experimentation
is needed, there is little enthusiasm in Europe at the moment for initiatives in pursuit of
greater cooperation.
The fifth reform is the global wealth tax proposed by Thomas Piketty. The central
attraction of Piketty’s proposal for a global tax on capital is that such a tax could get
to the main source of inequality far more effectively than an income tax. Because the
very wealthy only take a very small proportion of their wealth as income, typically
much smaller than the percentage by which their wealth grows, inequality of wealth
can grow even with a progressive income tax (Piketty 2014: 525). What is more, given
the high levels of private wealth, even a tax at a modest rate would bring in significant
revenue for social-​welfare policies that support people living in poverty and with low
incomes.
In Europe, a tax of 2.5 per cent would generate revenues equivalent to 2 per cent of
Europe’s GDP (Piketty 2014: 528). If a modest tax were to be implemented that did not
address inequality much, it would nonetheless generate valuable information about the
global distribution of wealth by requiring the reporting of wealth (pp. 518–​19) and by
requiring states to broaden their agreements about sharing banking data (p. 520). The
latter would remove the possibility of hiding money away in remote countries, since
it would require all countries to cooperate by agreeing to, and enforcing, a tax sched-
ule applicable to wealth everywhere. The idea of a global, progressive wealth tax seems
utopian under current conditions. But the proposal is nonetheless useful as a standard
against which to measure the effectiveness of other proposals to reduce global inequality
(p. 515). The five reforms sketched above indicate how global egalitarianism might guide
international practice, as well as the extent to which normative theories must draw on
research in the social sciences in order to have practical relevance within the context to
which they apply.
126   Darrel Moellendorf

Practice, Context, and Critique

The membership-​dependent account of cosmopolitanism presented above is empiric-

ally rooted in three ways. First, the principle of associational justice applies if and only
if the association satisfies certain empirical conditions. We do not owe duties of egali-
tarian social justice to everyone, but only to co-​members of associations of the requis-
ite kind. Second, the nature of the association determines the metric of justice. If there
is a justificatory presumption of equality, consideration of the context is necessary to
determine what egalitarianism concerns. Third, the changes supported by the account
take into consideration the existing empirical literature on how the association might be
reformed.
But unlike some contextualist accounts of justice, the present membership-​dependent
account also provides the basis for a critical theory. Although the account bears a resem-
blance to Michael Walzer’s account of justice, which takes principles to be dependent
on different spheres of social life (Walzer 1983), it is better able to support criticisms of
the distributive principles governing the spheres of social life. Contrary to Walzer, the
present membership-​dependent account is founded on equal human dignity, which is
the basis of justificatory respect. Such respect establishes a justificatory presumption of
equality in all associations in which duties of justice exists. Goods might vary accord-
ing to associations, and principles might too, but the justificatory presumption makes
egalitarianism the benchmark against which departures must be justified reciprocally.
Walzer seeks to ensure the critical capacity of his account by insulating spheres from
one another. The membership-​dependent account presented above ensures critical cap-
acity by means of the demands of justificatory respect. Respect for the equal dignity of
all persons requires that the rule of the relevant associations be justifiable to them. Such
requirement establishes the justificatory presumption of equality.
There could be version of membership dependence for which, in David Miller’s
words, the “context dependence of principles goes all the way down” (Miller 2002: 7).
Such accounts would be altogether too conventionalist. Accounts without leverage on
the norms of existing associations could be widely accepted, but they would lack the
basis upon which to criticize that acceptance (Williams 2005). A critical theory must be
able to do that. In the membership-​dependent account presented above, the principles
are not context-​dependent all the way down. On the contrary, although they apply only
in certain contexts and their metrics are context-​sensitive, the egalitarian justificatory
presumption of justificatory respect has nothing to do with existing conventions. The
critical force is based there. The empirical rootedness of the theory plus its critical force
should appeal to some versions of contemporary realism in political theory, which stress
the importance of such features (Stears 2005). Other realist accounts criticize normative
theories that fail to begin by offering an understanding of politics (Rossi and Sleat 2014;
see Chapter 48). Politics is not central to the present account; rather, associational fea-
tures are. Indeed, it is a virtue of the present account that it takes concerns of justice to
 Real-World Global Egalitarianism    127

apply in cases, such as the global economy, in which political governance is not strong.
Once again, this aspect of the critical force of the account is lacking in more convention-
alist accounts.

Concluding Remarks

The discussions of global inequality and global egalitarianism offered in this chapter
provide evidence that normative political theory can both be rooted in empirical under-
standings of the world and existing problems and still have the capacity to apply prin-
ciples that offer a critical normative perspective on the world and its problems. I hope
that the examples nonetheless provide some reason to believe that normative theorists
of international justice often do well to develop accounts that are informed by empirical
accounts both in the development of the relevant normative principles and in the dis-
cussion of how progress in light of those principles might be made. The world must be
understood. But accounts of normative theory do not aim simply to interpret the world;
they aim to change it.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robyn Eckersley for advice in the development of this chapter, Eszter
Kollar for comments on the penultimate version of the chapter, and Lukas Sparenborg for
applying the proper format.

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 ­c hapter 10

Moral Resp onsi bi l i t y—​

and Luc k ?—​i n
Internationa l P ol i t i c s

Toni Erskine

International politics is a realm in which deprivation, disadvantage, and harm are

all-​too-​common phenomena. Justice, we argue, demands a response. Such a response
generally takes one of two forms. We may place the burden of performing preventive or
remedial actions on particular agents. We may also evaluate the wrongdoing, reckless-
ness, or neglect that led to the injustice and apportion blame (and possibly punishment)
accordingly. To complicate matters, both moves reasonably follow from different inter-
pretations of a single question: Who is responsible? Indeed, in the context of consider-
ations of global justice, focused on what the multifarious agents in international politics
owe each other and why, both moves follow from the desire to locate specifically moral
responsibility.
In order to understand international politics, and the powerful judgements that are
made in the course of its conduct and analysis, an appreciation of the complex terrain of
moral responsibility is essential. Unfortunately, the study of international politics, in the
guise of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), has largely eschewed
questions of moral responsibility—​at least in the prescriptive and evaluative senses
just highlighted. Indeed, mainstream IR is methodologically predisposed to be wary
of such endeavours (Erskine 2012: 459–​60). By contrast, International Political Theory
(IPT)—​understood here as an extension of moral and political philosophy beyond
their traditional focus within the political community, and as a subfield of IR (Erskine
2008a: 9–​10)—​explicitly and unapologetically explores the ethical dimension of inter-
national politics. Importantly, IPT’s value lies not merely in taking the tools of moral
and political philosophy and expanding the scope of analysis from the community or
state to the globe—​not at its best and most provocative, anyway. Even while IPT takes
inspiration from these branches of philosophy—​borrowing theories of justice, duty,
and rights, and adopting a methodology (foreign to social scientific IR) that employs
 Moral Responsibility—and Luck?   131

hypothetical examples in order to single out variables and interrogate our intuitions—​
it is also influenced by IR’s concern with concrete cases and empirical research, and
is able to draw on the theoretical frameworks that mainstream IR has developed to
explain them. By bringing together insights from disciplinary perspectives that are
too often treated in strict (and even antagonistic) isolation, work in IPT has the poten-
tial to challenge the limitations of each—​and thereby explore concepts such as moral
responsibility anew.
One way of exploring questions of moral responsibility in international politics is
to address the distinct yet interrelated factors of agency, structure, and (more contro-
versially) luck. Agency and structure receive valuable, ongoing attention in relation to
questions of moral responsibility in international politics, with analyses benefiting from
IPT’s particular constellation of influences. The role of luck in attributions of moral
responsibility at the international level has, however, been ignored. The purpose of this
chapter is to begin to redress this neglect and, in the process, to demonstrate how IPT
is uniquely placed to do so. An ancillary aim is to consider whether the subtle influ-
ence of chance not only unsettles our understanding of moral responsibility but also,
concomitantly, disturbs common accounts of other concepts in ways that have impli-
cations across any proposed division between normative and empirical approaches to
international politics.
I will start by returning to the two forms that judgements of moral responsibility take,
highlighting fundamental philosophical assumptions common to both, and briefly
touching on how these assumptions enrich, and are enriched by, mainstream IR’s prom-
inent understandings of agency and structure when ethical scrutiny shifts from the
domestic to the international sphere. I will then turn to “moral luck”—​a concept that has
been invoked in philosophical debates as a foil to largely Kantian conceptions of moral
responsibility, but hitherto sorely neglected in analyses of international politics. While
introducing three variations on moral luck, I will suggest that chance and contingency
already infuse ethical analyses of practical problems ranging from climate change to pro-
tecting vulnerable populations from mass atrocity. The crucial question that accompan-
ies this proposal is whether acknowledging this presence threatens to shift the ground
on which our ascriptions of moral responsibility rest, or instead simply affords a more
nuanced and accurate account of the existing landscape.

Judgements of Moral Responsibility

To be morally responsible for a particular act or outcome is usefully described as being

answerable for it. Indeed, “responsibility” comes from the Latin respondeo, “I answer”
(Lucas 1993: 5). Significantly, this description can cover two divergent yet equally legit-
imate understandings: prospective and retrospective moral responsibility.1 When one
claims that an agent is morally responsible for an act or an outcome, answerability is
conceived in terms of the agent either being the one expected to perform or achieve
132   Toni Erskine

it or, alternatively, being the object of blame (or possibly praise) for what has already
occurred.
Calls of prospective moral responsibility entail ex ante judgements regarding acts
that ought to be performed or forbearances that must be observed. These are regularly
voiced in the language of duties, responsibilities, and obligations.2 Assertions of retro-
spective moral responsibility involve ex post facto assessments of a particular event or
set of circumstances for which an agent’s acts or omissions were such that the agent is
deemed deserving of blame or praise. These are articulated most often in the language of
blame, culpability, guilt, and accountability, and are frequently linked to calls for repar-
ation or punishment. Both are potentially powerful judgements that appeal to what we
understand to be moral requirements.
To be coherent, such judgements must satisfy two criteria. First, they must be directed
towards moral agents, or actors that possess capacities for understanding and reflecting
upon moral requirements, and for acting in such a way as to conform to these require-
ments. Second, the moral agent must experience some degree of “independence from
other forces and agents” (O’Neill 1986: 51). Put differently, ascriptions of duty and blame
must attach to those agents who not only possess the capacities to respond to moral
requirements but also enjoy the freedom to act or to have acted.
Each assumption provides an important starting point for assessing moral responsi-
bility in international politics. Each also connects with insights from mainstream IR’s
dominant focus on causal analysis, and, specifically, from respective sides of its well-​
rehearsed opposition between theoretical frameworks that concentrate on (corporate)
autonomous agents and those that champion the explanatory power of global struc-
tures.3 Who—​or what—​we recognize as moral agents has a profound effect on our scope
for moral assessment in international politics. Valuable philosophical studies that shed
light on the nature of moral responsibility often depict moral agents exhaustively in
the guise of individual human beings, yet this fails to support compelling accounts of
our expectations and failures in international politics (Erskine 2008b). Positions that
defend the inclusion of corporate entities within the class of moral agent (e.g. French
1984; O’Neill 1986; Erskine 2001; List and Pettit 2011) therefore have particular salience.
Indeed, the idea that formal organizations can qualify as moral agents—​what we might
label “institutional moral agents” (Erskine 2001)—​has become increasingly accepted
within IPT, with recent work often starting from this assumption (e.g. Bukovansky
et al. 2012; Karp 2014). Attention to global structures is also crucial to analyses of moral
responsibility. Structures variously constrain and enable moral agents acting within them,
thereby limiting or enhancing the freedom of these agents to choose and to act—​and
affecting what they can reasonably be considered answerable for (Erskine 2001: 183–​6).
Global structures also represent objects of reform in pursuit of a more just world.
Important work within IPT addresses the moral responsibilities of both flesh-​and-​blood
and institutional moral agents to reform global structures that cause or perpetuate harm
and injustice (e.g. Pogge 2002; Young 2011). In short, both agency and structure inform
our judgements of moral responsibility in international politics. Luck complicates these
ostensibly familiar themes.
 Moral Responsibility—and Luck?   133

The Neglected Role of Luck

Luck is oddly overlooked in most analyses of international politics—​and as a concept

worthy of attention in IR.4 Yet luck has potentially profound implications for both the-
ory and practice. It is particularly relevant, and potentially unsettling, with respect to
our assessments of moral responsibility. The controversial idea of “moral luck” was
introduced by Bernard Williams (1976) and extended in a response by Thomas Nagel
(1976).5 Since then it has been variously debated, refined, and rejected by philosophers
(see Statman 1993b; Nelkin 2013). According to standard accounts in contemporary
ethical thought, an agent cannot be morally accountable for what is outside the agent’s
control. In the words of Joel Feinberg (1970, 32), “[m]‌oral responsibility [ . . . ] must be
something one can neither escape by good luck nor tumble into through bad luck.” Yet,
the possibility of moral luck boldly contradicts the conviction that our moral apprais-
als are immune to the influence of chance. As defined by Nagel (1979: 66), moral luck
occurs “[w]here a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond
his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgement.”
In such instances, our moral judgements are subject to fickle fate.
Drawing on the seminal contributions of Williams and Nagel, I will outline three
distinct types of moral luck—​often labelled “circumstantial luck,” “resultant luck,” and
“constitutive luck”6—​and explore whether and how each affects our judgements of
moral responsibility. In this endeavour, I will depart from standard philosophical inter-
rogations of moral luck in two respects. First, my focus will be on institutional moral
agents in international politics as the objects of moral responsibility judgements, rather
than on individual human agents in a domestic context. Second, while the idea of moral
luck is understood in relation to assessments of retrospective moral responsibility, or
evaluations of praise and blame, I will also question what each of the three conceptions
might contribute to considerations of prospective moral responsibility, or assessments
of what particular agents ought to do in specific contexts. My aim in this section is to
uncover instances of moral luck in the assessments that we already make in international
politics, and ask what they mean for the account of moral responsibility sketched above.

Circumstantial Luck
Nagel (1976: 140) introduces the idea of “luck in one’s circumstances”—​simply, the elem­
ent of chance involved in being confronted by particular situations and dilemmas that
test one and ultimately result in judgements of praise or blame. His example takes us
back to Germany in the 1930s (Nagel 1976: 145–​6). “Ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany
had an opportunity to behave heroically by opposing the regime,” he observes. “They
also had an opportunity to behave badly, and most of them are culpable for having failed
this test.” Significantly, “it is a test to which the citizens of other countries were not sub-
jected, with the result that even if they, or some of them, would have behaved as badly as
134   Toni Erskine

the Germans in like circumstances, they simply did not and therefore are not similarly
culpable.” Nagel concludes that “[w]‌e judge people for what they actually do or fail to
do, not just for what they would have done if circumstance had been different.” In this
respect, “one is morally at the mercy of fate.” The point is not that there is anything amiss
with judging moral agents for their acts and omissions, but, rather, with the relative
assessment of moral agents—​as culpable and estimable—​when they would have likely
behaved indistinguishably had they been subject to the same circumstances.
Circumstantial luck may seem at first glance to have some affinity with considerations
of structure. Yet the perceived challenge to moral responsibility judgements is not the
constraining force of the circumstances in which the agent is situated. As alluded to
above, when structures circumscribe agents’ choices, attributions of moral responsibil-
ity are commonly mitigated accordingly. Instead, the concern is with the capriciousness
of circumstance. The agents in Nagel’s example could have acted otherwise and so are
appropriate objects of moral censure, yet—​unlike other agents—​were placed in a situ-
ation where failure was possible, and indeed likely.
Other examples of circumstantial luck, which involve institutional rather than flesh-​
and-​blood moral agents, include the uniquely challenging demands currently faced by
some states in the context of refugee flows and climate change. To address the latter,
I take it as uncontroversial that states cannot coherently be blamed for releasing harm-
ful greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere prior to the point at which know-
ledge of the causal link between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and global warming
became widely accessible (perhaps from about 1990 with the publication of the first
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report). States can, however,
be blamed for the harm caused by high levels of emissions after this point. Yet, enlight-
ened states (about the effects of greenhouse gases) have found themselves facing radic-
ally different choices. Developing states that had not industrialized when this causal link
became apparent confront a singularly difficult dilemma. They have a strong incentive
to increase rather than decrease their emissions (if they wish to avoid being left behind
economically), despite knowledge of the harm that this would do to the environment.
States that industrialized “innocently” (at least with reference to carbon emissions) do
not face the same dilemma.
A couple of things are important here. First, and crucially, recognition of circumstan-
tial luck does not undermine the understanding of moral responsibility judgements
already addressed. Polluting states that baulk at sacrificing their own development to
prevent increases in global warming, like Nagel’s “ordinary citizens” who refused to
accept risk to themselves by opposing the Nazi regime, are morally responsible for the
harm that they reasonably could have been expected to prevent. Second, acknowledg-
ing circumstantial luck (of the type presented in Nagel’s example) nevertheless appears
to lobby for some attenuation of the blame directed at the agent facing trying circum-
stances. Significantly, Nagel’s example invokes the majority of “ordinary citizens” who
failed “to behave heroically” by opposing the Nazi regime. (I do not understand this ref-
erence to be to those who perpetrated crimes, but rather to those with knowledge of
harm being done who opted for self-​preservation over taking action to try to stop it.)7
 Moral Responsibility—and Luck?   135

His suggestion that others would have also failed if they had experienced these circum-
stances is compelling, even if we each might like to believe that we would be the shining
exception. States that refuse to jettison their own development can be seen to follow an
understandable—​although hardly ideal or heroic—​path. There seems to be a process of
tempering expectations, an acknowledgement of the fallibility of agents in a “there but
for the grace of God go I” qualification of blame that accompanies such revelations of
circumstantial luck.
Practically, this might have the potential to push those agents who did not face this
test to qualify their condemnation, and even consider a more just distribution of the
costs of hard circumstantial luck.8 The realization of circumstantial luck might also
move these situationally fortunate agents in another direction. Embracing an under-
standing of what is morally required while acknowledging that they would likely dero-
gate from this standard if they faced similar circumstances might prompt these agents
to see themselves as sharing in blame for contributing to a normative structure in which
such dissonance is possible (and self-​preservation can so easily trump moves toward the
protection of others and the prevention of broader harm). This could, in turn, inform
our forward-​looking responsibilities by pushing us either to reassess or to articulate
more strongly what we understand to be moral requirements, so that it is not as easy to
attribute wrongdoing to the circumstances that the agent happens to encounter.

Resultant Luck
Resultant luck draws our attention to how the contingency of outcomes can influence
our moral assessments. Nagel (1976: 141) illustrates two types of resultant luck: one
involves negligence and recklessness; the other attaches to decisions made in the face of
uncertainty. As an example of the first, Nagel describes someone driving under the influ-
ence of alcohol whose car swerves onto the sidewalk. If there happens to be no one on
the sidewalk at the time, Nagel suggests that “he can count himself morally lucky.” Had
there been people on the sidewalk, “he would be to blame for their deaths, and would
probably be prosecuted for manslaughter.” Yet, “his recklessness is exactly the same in
both cases.” Nagel suggests that this is another example of moral luck because our differ-
ent moral assessments in the respective scenarios are due to their divergent outcomes,
and these outcomes depend on something beyond the agent’s control. Behaving reck-
lessly is under one’s control; the other factors that contribute to blame in the latter case
are not.
Comparable cases in international politics are easily uncovered. Transnational cor-
porations, like BP, face sanctions, fines, and widespread condemnation of moral fail-
ure when their flouting of safety procedures results in environmental disaster, such as
the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Corporations that may be equally negligent and
reckless, but—​through nothing more than their own (and others’) good fortune—​avoid
having this translated into catastrophic harm might seem to be let off the moral hook
in terms of being spared these responses. Yet, unlike Nagel, I am not convinced that
136   Toni Erskine

our moral assessments of the agents in the two cases would (or should) be different if
it were clear that their intentions and (unmediated) deeds are indistinguishable. As
such, this type of resultant luck does not seem to offer a great challenge to our moral-​
responsibility judgements. In each scenario, we simply morally assess what we know. As
Norvin Richards (1986: 199) observes, different judgements across these cases “reflect
our epistemic shortcomings.” Nagel’s hypothetical pedestrian deaths were harms that
would have triggered an investigation and punitive action; the 2010 oil spill indicated
possibly negligent and reckless practices, which were confirmed in subsequent reviews.
Different moral assessments in such cases are not obviously due to our understand-
ing of moral responsibility being surreptitiously skewed by luck but, rather, to practi-
cal impediments to forming and expressing these judgements. The reality of divergent
responses to the same negligent behaviour usefully points to constraints on what we can
know, and to related limitations on the conditions under which we can consistently and
fairly express condemnation and punish wrongdoing.
Nagel’s second variation on resultant luck, inspired by Williams (1976), involves
decisions under uncertainty. Like the first, the agent in question contributes to an out-
come, this time in the form of a decision to take a particular course of action when
the consequences cannot be foreseen. Again, there are also contributions to the out-
come that are beyond the agent’s control. Such elements of chance, Nagel observes,
can be pivotal to our moral assessment of the decision. He illustrates this with coun-
terfactual examples, including the following (1976: 142): “[i]‌f the American revolution
had been a bloody failure resulting in greater repression,” then Jefferson, Franklin,
and Washington would have been blamed for the suffering that “they had helped to
bring on their compatriots” and certainly would not have been deemed worthy of the
praise that came with their actual success. As Nagel acknowledges, we can evaluate the
decision to act in advance of knowing the outcome; however, our moral evaluations of
such choices are, in fact, often informed subsequently by the actual results. “The same
degree of culpability or estimability in intention, motive, or concern is compatible with
a wide range of judgements, positive or negative, depending on what happened beyond
the point of decision” (Nagel 1976: 143). Contingency thereby creeps in as an object of
moral assessment.
Deferred assessments of the decisions of states and intergovernmental organizations
to engage in military interventions for human protection purposes are invitations to this
type of resultant luck. The widely endorsed “responsibility to protect” demands careful
consideration of when and how members of the international community can legitim-
ately respond to a state’s manifest failure to protect its populations from mass atrocity
(Ban Ki-​moon 2009; see Chapter 25). Invoking, among other cases, NATO’s 1999 inter-
vention in Kosovo and a counterfactual, timely intervention in Rwanda in 1994, the
drafters of the 2001 International Committee on Intervention and State Sovereignty
Report proposed that decisions to discharge this responsibility through military means
be evaluated after the fact in those controversial cases in which UN Security Council
authorization is lacking (ICISS 2001: 48, 54). In practice, such judgements unavoidably
take account of outcomes in evaluating decisions to intervene. Indeed, this is exactly
 Moral Responsibility—and Luck?   137

what happened in the retrospective assessment of NATO’s decision to intervene in

Kosovo (IICK 2000: 4).
Leaving moral responsibility judgements wide open to luck in this way represents
a great gamble. Yet, rather than chipping away at our conventional understanding of
moral responsibility, this variation on resultant luck cautions against avoidable error.
Backward-​looking evaluations of a decision to act (or refrain from acting) should be
judged according to what it was possible for agents to know at the time. Although subse-
quent acts and omission are also open to evaluation, the merit of a decision—​to engage
in humanitarian intervention, for example—​should not be vulnerable to negation by
an unintended and unforeseeable calamitous result. Likewise, contra the argument of
Nicholas Wheeler (2000: 38–​9), a serendipitous humanitarian outcome that follows an
otherwise-​intended military intervention should not retrospectively rescue the legitim-
acy of a state’s decision to engage in the action. This variation on resultant luck speaks to
considerations of prospective moral responsibility by reinforcing the imperative to act
only when it is possible to offer a fully informed, compelling justification of the decision
to do so, which heeds clear precautionary principles and will withstand any result. It also
warns of the folly in allowing the morality of a decision to be either held hostage to or
redeemed by fortune.

Constitutive Luck
“Constitutive luck” is potentially more disruptive to standard conceptions of moral
responsibility. Here, I adopt the label coined by Williams (1976; 1981) and (in the absence
of an explicit treatment by Williams) construct an account that is inspired by his reflec-
tions on moral luck as they relate to the impact of events beyond the agent’s control on
the agent’s own sense of moral responsibility and identity.9 Constitutive luck, as I under-
stand it, can be summed up by the idea that one’s “sense of who one is in terms of what
one has done and what in the world one is responsible for” is shaped, at least in part, by
the unintended aspects of one’s actions (Williams 1981: 29–​30). Constitutive luck thus
conceived can accompany the types of resultant luck just addressed but, in its starkest
and most unsettling form, also involves cases where the agent contributes to some out-
come yet the agent is entirely without fault and the contribution is completely accidental.
One of Williams’s examples is crucial to this understanding. He describes an unfor-
tunate lorry driver who happens “through no fault of his” to run over a child—​perhaps
a child who suddenly ran into the street to retrieve a ball. The driver could not pos-
sibly have anticipated the accident. Unlike the example above, he was neither negligent
nor reckless. Yet, in strict terms, his action caused the child’s death. Williams (1981: 27)
observes that the driver will feel a particular “species of regret” that he labels “agent
regret,” which “a person can only feel towards his own past actions (or, at most, actions
in which he regards himself as a participant).” Even though the driver unintentionally
and faultlessly caused the death of the child, he is tormented by the thought that he
could have acted otherwise; moreover, he is motivated to make some reparation. The
138   Toni Erskine

notion of “agent regret” is not, then, only a response to what one has intentionally done,
but can also extend to “deeply accidental and non-​voluntary levels of agency” (Williams
1981: 28). Indeed, Williams maintains that it would be impossible to “entirely detach
ourselves from the unintentional aspects of our actions” and “still retain our identity
and character as agents” (p. 29). Although he is concerned primarily with the agent’s
self-​assessment of his actions, it is clear that Williams thinks both that the agent should
feel this way and that others expect the agent to feel this way: “[w]‌e feel sorry for the
driver, but that sentiment co-​exists with, indeed presupposes, that there is something
special about his relation to this happening, something which cannot merely be elim-
inated by the consideration that it was not his fault” (p. 28). Williams goes as far as to
maintain that we would be critical of the driver if he did not experience this regret.
There are two distinct ideas that come out of Williams’s example. First, neither what
we accept (some degree of) retrospective moral responsibility for, nor the prospective
moral responsibilities deemed to be incurred as a result, are quite so tightly tied to what
is within our control as we might like to assume. Although he does not engage with
Williams’ argument explicitly, this is surely the point that David Miller (2001: 458) has
in mind when he writes of “innocent causation” and its mysterious tendency to generate
not only regret (and the appropriateness of apology), but also “some special responsi-
bility” for remedial action on the part of an accidental agent. Second, an agent’s critical
self-​assessment for something that was unintended and, indeed, beyond the agent’s
control can nevertheless inform the very identity of the agent going forward—​and even
contribute to the agent’s future choices and actions (which will, in turn, be subject to
moral assessment). Alluding to exactly this argument, Peter Euben (2012: 88) observes
that “what we have done constitutes our character which in turn establishes the kinds of
actions that we will and can do.”
There are clear cases of both ideas complicating assessments of moral responsibility
in international politics. An example of “innocent causation” that seems nonetheless to
carry a sense of moral responsibility can be found in some defences of the “polluter pays
principle,” according to which states that produced the most emissions have the great-
est responsibility to remedy the current crisis. A state that generated harmful emissions
prior to there being general knowledge that greenhouse gases produce climate change
provides an example of “innocent causation”; contingency placed the agent in the role
of perpetrator of unintended and unforeseeable harm.10 To the extent that there is some
intuition that such a state should nevertheless bear a burden of responsibility for this
historical harm—​independent of considerations of having benefited and the capacity
for remedial action—​this broader conception of moral responsibility holds sway. As
Janna Thompson (2016: 3) argues in the context of climate change, “excusably ignorant
agents can do injustice and thus be liable for reparations.”11 Again, innocent causation is
linked to what we understand to be an agent’s remedial responsibilities. Moreover, there
is a perverse sense in which the agent is seen as somehow deserving the costs of remedial
action.
One can also talk about the character of particular corporate entities in inter-
national politics, and their subsequent actions, being affected by their involvement in
 Moral Responsibility—and Luck?   139

unintended, calamitous outcomes. Chris Brown (2008) explores whether Western

states’ roles in humanitarian interventions, such as Somalia in 1992–​3, and the appar-
ent resulting sentiments of guilt and responsibility, affected their policies in respond-
ing (or not) to future crises, such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Admittedly, Miller’s
phrase “innocent causation” is not appropriate here. Military intervention, even if we
could assume consistently laudable intentions, is always going to result in foreseeable,
if unintended, deaths (unlike driving a lorry). But, to invoke a phrase used by Williams
(1981: 29), there will be consequences for which the agent was “unintentionally respon-
sible”—​indeed, consequences beyond the agent’s control.
I hesitate to talk about Williams’ agent-​regret in the context of corporate entities
if this might be seen to imbue them with emotions, and thereby anthropomorphize
states and other institutional actors in a way that I argue is unnecessary for recogniz-
ing them as moral agents and unhelpful in practice (Erskine 2008c).12 Yet, the degree
to which this aspect of constitutive luck can be applied to corporate entities in inter-
national politics is an intriguing question. We can talk about unintended harm—​and
accompanying censure, including self-​censure—​informing the character and iden-
tity of the institutional moral agent that caused it without venturing into the conten-
tious territory of ascribing emotions to the agent that are not reducible to its individual
human constituents. There will, after all, be consequences for the corporate agent in
such cases, both in terms of reactions from other agents—​condemnation and demands
for redress—​and (perhaps less tangibly but no less powerfully) in terms of the disson-
ance between how it presents and perceives itself and the actual effects of its actions.
In contrast to the observation earlier in this chapter that our understanding of agency
informs our moral assessments, constitutive luck subverts the relationship and sug-
gests that moral responsibility judgements—​even those that rely, perhaps problemat-
ically, on much that is beyond the control of the object of assessment—​can inform, and
reconstitute, agency.

Conclusion

“Moral luck” is a provocation and a puzzle—​one that takes us beyond IPT’s current
focus on agency and structure in analyses of moral responsibility in international polit-
ics. It suggests that chance and contingency can variously infiltrate our moral responsi-
bility judgements, and even lead them astray, by affecting the nature of agents’ choices,
the consequences of their actions, and, perhaps most profoundly, their very character
and the way they define themselves. By drawing on philosophy’s seminal contributions
to this purposely paradoxical notion, and applying a typology extracted from these early
contributions to cases involving corporate actors in international politics, this chapter
has sought to explore whether this influence undermines or can be accommodated by
our understanding of moral responsibility—​and what we can learn from it. The respect-
ive categories of moral luck elicit different responses.
140   Toni Erskine

Epiphanies of circumstantial luck can hold heuristic value. They prompt us to

revisit—​or, alternatively, more forcefully articulate—​the shared understandings that
underpin what we deem to be moral requirements. As for the mirage of resultant luck in
differential moral assessments of cases of negligence or recklessness, it encourages us to
distinguish between when, in theory, a moral agent deserves blame, and when, in prac-
tice, we can confidently make this judgement and respond. Instances of resultant luck
that taint our assessments of decisions under uncertainty warn against allowing deci-
sions to be judged based on their outcomes—​a move that the causal complexity of global
structures renders particularly risky. None of these manifestations of moral luck pro-
vides a knockdown blow to conventional understandings of moral responsibility judge-
ments. Rather, they have the potential to sharpen our moral assessments of international
politics. The idea of constitutive luck, however, is more unsettling.
One cannot completely extricate luck from agency. Williams (1981: 29–​30) maintains
that it is possible to draw from this one of two conclusions: “that responsible agency is
a fairly superficial concept, which has a limited use in harmonizing what happens,” or,
alternatively, “that it is not a superficial concept, but that it cannot be purified.” He comes
out on the side of the latter. For Williams, an agent’s sense of self, acceptance of respon-
sibility, and reasons for acting are coloured and conditioned by contingency and chance
events. This conception of “impure agency,” to borrow Margaret Urban Walker’s felici-
tous phrase (1991), not only complicates notions of moral responsibility in international
politics but also speaks to assumptions within mainstream IR. “Impure agency” matters
for IPT’s evaluative and prescriptive endeavours in relation to questions of global justice
because it fosters rogue intuitions that agents can be accountable for events beyond what
they could have foreseen or controlled—​and that they may therefore bear some repara-
tive cost. It matters for mainstream IR’s causal analyses because luck enters the fray as an
unmapped, external determinant that can reconstitute agents and their preferences—​
and thereby casts doubt on both accepted causal narratives and the explanatory and
predictive value of its model of the ideal, rational actor. Both sets of challenges invite
further attention.

Acknowledgements
This chapter was drafted while I was Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Politics
and International Relations at Oxford University. I am grateful to the Department for pro-
viding a stimulating environment in which to write. I am also indebted to Peter Balint, Ned
Dobos, John Dryzek, Cian O’Driscoll, David Miller, Jonathan Pickering, and Ana Tanasoca for
detailed feedback on earlier drafts, and to Alex Bellamy and Simon Caney for valuable discus-
sions of particular points

Notes
1. I owe this distinction to past discussions with Onora O’Neill. See also Feinberg (1970: 25–​
6, 26n.) with reference to legal responsibility, and Erskine (2003: 8).
 Moral Responsibility—and Luck?   141

2. I will treat these interchangeably for the purposes of this chapter.

3. See e.g. Wight (2006).
4. Work within IPT that invokes “luck egalitarianism”—​the idea that advantages and disad-
vantages arising from accidents of birth and natural talent are not deserved and therefore
should be subject to a more egalitarian (and just) redistribution—​is an important excep-
tion, and distinct from this chapter’s focus.
5. These arguments were revised in Williams (1981) and Nagel (1979), respectively, and
touched on previously by Feinberg (1970: 31–​2, 34–​7).
6. See e.g. Statman (1993a: 11). Nagel (1976/​1979) also describes a category that Statman has
called “causal luck”; however, I take this to be encompassed within the other categories.
7. A passing remark in his revised essay (Nagel 1979: 26) confirms that Nagel also contem-
plated the case of Nazi war criminals; yet they do not fit his description of “most” “ordinary
citizens” in the current example.
8. Of course, that the erstwhile innocent polluters are causally responsible for the lack
of absorption capacity left to those facing the dilemma and, moreover, benefited from
this excusable harm are also potential considerations in the emissions vs development
example.
9. Nagel (1976: 140) articulates a narrower notion of “constitutive luck” as luck in “the kind of
person you are [ . . . ] your inclinations, capacities and temperament.”
10. Of course, chance might also make agents accidental providers of good (like the fortuitous
agents of humanitarian outcomes, noted above).
11. Emphasis mine. For an objection, see Caney (2010: 209).
12. Notably, Brown (2008) avoids this conundrum by referring to the guilty feelings of indi-
vidual decision-​makers and state leaders.

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 ­c hapter 11

In ternationa l L aw a nd
Internationa l J u st i c e

Hilary Charlesworth

If international political theory involves “normative and prescriptive theorizing” as well

as the study of political phenomena, debates about international justice are central to
the field (see Chapter 4). This chapter investigates one particular aspect of international
justice—​its relationship with international law. From a legal perspective, this relation-
ship is critical, as lawyers regard justice as their particular province. A sense of com-
mitment to improving the world and a deep faith in the humanitarian powers of legal
rules seems to be heightened in the international legal profession, even if it is sometimes
inflected with a resigned realism about the impact of law internationally. The purpose of
the international legal system is generally understood in ambitious terms as the achieve-
ment of international justice (Koskenniemi 2001). While this term is constantly invoked
by international lawyers, they have only rarely ventured to theorize the concept of inter-
national justice. It appears as a fluffy cloud of aspirations hovering over the international
legal system, including notions as disparate as allocation of responsibility for breaches of
international legal standards by one state against another, compensation for economic
disparities between states and adverse colonial legacies, redress for human-​rights vio-
lations of groups and individuals, and justification for international intervention. Over
the past few decades, however, international lawyers have come to associate the idea of
international justice largely with the work of international criminal tribunals. This asso-
ciation has constricted accounts of international justice in the international legal order,
leaving questions of structural inequality untouched.
The focus of this contribution is international justice. Over the past two decades the
term “global justice” has become popular (e.g. Brilmayer and Shapiro 1999). Sometimes
the latter term is simply a synonym for the former, but it may also signal particular atten-
tion to redressing economic imbalances between states. In any event, the idea of justice,
whether characterized as international or global, resists theorization. As Iris Marion
Young has pointed out, a theory of justice implies a universally applicable normative
account of social life. To be generally applicable, such an account risks being too abstract
144   Hilary Charlesworth

to evaluate real institutions and practices; if, on the other hand, it contains substantive
commitments, it is likely to reflect the specific social and economic context in which it
was devised (Young 1990: 3–​4). Using notions of oppression and domination to identify
injustice, Young proposes reflective discourse about justice as an alternative to a search
for a theory, involving the clarification of concepts, the description of social relations,
and the articulation of ideals (Young 1990: 5). Following this proposal, in this chapter
I offer an account of some intersections of the international legal system with notions of
justice.

International Law

The term “international law” usually refers to the system of rules that governs relation-
ships between states (see Chapter 5). Matters such as the exchange of diplomats, the
negotiation of treaties, and the use of force by one state against another are the classical
concerns of international legal regulation. Since the adoption of the United Nations
Charter in 1945, however, international law has developed to encompass not only states
but also individuals as potential subjects. For example, the Charter commits UN mem-
ber states to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms (Article 1).
The Italian jurist Antonio Cassese has described two opposing tendencies in the
international legal order that influence ideas of international justice. Cassese terms the
first tendency “Westphalian,” a reference to the 1648 treaties of Westphalia associated
with the inception of a European state-​based international order. The major features of
the Westphalian order, according to Cassese, are: an emphasis on national sovereignty
and a reluctance to acknowledge external powers; the use of force viewed as the primary
source of legitimation; and the decentralization of legal functions, such as dispute reso-
lution and law enforcement. Cassese has said of the Westphalian model: “The resulting
picture is that of a community where law does not place any restraint on power [. . . and]
[e]‌conomic, social and military inequalities fail to be taken into account” (Cassese
1986: 396–​9). In the Westphalian world, then, centred on the maintenance of state sover-
eignty, the idea of justice has limited purchase.
The second tendency identified by Cassese is the Charter order, shaped by the prin-
ciples of the UN Charter. The Charter order is replete with justice projects. It is charac-
terized by the development of universal norms of conduct and a concern with justice
rather than power; attention to the human rights of individuals; the growth of inter-
national institutions; and sweeping restrictions on the use of force. The discourse of
the UN Charter gives prominence to justice as a distinct category of international law.
Thus the opening words of the Charter’s Preamble identify the establishment of “condi-
tions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other
sources of international law can be maintained” as one of the primary rationales for the
UN (see also Article 1.1). The Charter promotes justice, along with peace and security, as
touchstones for the settlement of international disputes (e.g. Article 2.3).
 International Law and International Justice    145

Cassese has observed that the Charter order has not completely displaced the
Westphalian order, and that the two coexist in uneasy tension in international soci-
ety. This can be seen in the various eras of modern international law since 1945, and
it is possible to identify both Westphalian and Charter accounts of international just-
ice weaving through the international system. During the Cold War, the institutions of
international law appeared largely irrelevant to international politics. However, in the
period between the 1950s and the mid-​1970s, decolonization radically changed inter-
national institutions, such as the UN General Assembly, by increasing their Third World
membership and altering the balance of power. A post-​Cold War revival of international
law beginning in 1989 heralded an era of institution-​building and what has been called
“triumphant legalism” (Simpson 2012: 42). The development of international criminal
law in the 1990s is an example of this, culminating in the adoption of the Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court in 1998, further discussed below. In this period
there was renewed enthusiasm about the power of international law, as these institu-
tions offered recognizable forms of enforcement. Since the turn of the century, however,
a certain disillusionment with and marginalization of international law has emerged,
especially relating to the collective use of force through international institutions. The
2003 invasion of Iraq exemplifies this partial return to Westphalian politics, with a per-
ception of international legal standards as dispensable ideals, obstacles to world order
if taken too seriously. At the same time, the Iraq invasion illustrates the porousness of
the Westphalian model of statehood, suggesting that its applicability in the European
empire is reduced.
The UN has regularly endorsed the idea of an international rule of law as part of its
mandate, but this has tended to be built on a rather thin account of justice. The UN
Millennium Declaration in 2000, for example, presented the international rule of law
as centring on ensuring compliance with decisions of the International Court of Justice
(United Nations 2000). Third World scholars of international law have pointed to the
weak connections between international law and a substantive conception of justice.
In this vein, B. S. Chimni has observed that, while the development of international
human rights law has assisted democracy movements in post-​colonial states, generally,
international legal rules “codify the interests of powerful states and social classes in the
international system” (Chimni 2012: 294). In other words, the formal structure of inter-
national law sustains fundamental inequalities and injustice (Gathii 2000).
One strategy to achieve justice in this context was the elaboration of a “new inter-
national economic order” (NIEO) in the 1970s. The NIEO movement was led by the G-​
77, the coalition of developing countries at the UN. Its goal was to support Third World
states’ economic sovereignty by strengthening their economic standing through
reform of the structure and norms of the international economic order (Gilman
2015: 3). The UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Establishment of a
NIEO in 1974 which invoked the language of justice. It endorsed, among other things,
the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources and the eradication of
all forms of foreign occupation and exploitation, a “just and equitable relationship”
between the prices paid for export of primary commodities from the Third World and
146   Hilary Charlesworth

the costs of imports from developed countries, transfer of resources to developing

countries, and regulation of the activities of transnational corporations. The NIEO
movement was sceptical about the capacity of the international legal system to fos-
ter its agenda. Indeed, its proponents argued that developing countries should not be
bound by treaty obligations assumed by colonial administrations (Gathii 2000). In the
end, the push for a NIEO petered out, although its central claim—​that justice requires
developed countries to compensate for the economic advantages they achieved
through exploitation of others—​remains powerful. It is evident, for example, in glo-
bal climate change negotiations in which binding obligations attach only to developed
states (Gilman 2015: 10).
Feminist international lawyers have also criticized the masculine structures and
norms of international law which fail to acknowledge the realities of many women’s
lives (e.g. Kouvo and Pearson, 2011). They have argued for forms of substantive just-
ice that go beyond a call for equal representation of women in international institu-
tions, including the legal recognition of harms characteristic of women’s lives. One
manifestation is campaigns for the acknowledgment of violence against women as a
matter of international concern. The Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing
and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, adopted in 2011, is
an example of such a feminist project, although it does not explicitly use the language
of justice. Its Preamble presents violence against women as a “manifestation of his-
torically unequal power relations between women and men,” and such behaviour is
defined as “a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women”
(Article 3(a)).

International Justice

Many understandings of international justice are inflected by the Westphalian under-

pinnings of international law which emphasize state sovereignty. In theory at least,
international legal rules bind because states have consented to them—​an international
adaptation of social contract theory (Franck 1995: 26–​7). This is most obvious in the
case of treaties which require specific forms of adherence and are governed by the prin-
ciple of pacta sunt servanda. It is also built into the theory of customary international
law, by which legal principles are generated through a combination of state practice
and a belief that that course of action is legally required (opinio juris). There are how-
ever some international legal concepts that gesture at ideas of justice transcending state
consent. One is the category of the jus cogens, peremptory norms of international law
to which no exception can be made. They are defined in the Vienna Convention on
the Law of Treaties of 1969 as “a norm accepted and recognized by the international
community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and
which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of international law having the
same character” (Article 53). Examples of such norms include prohibitions of slavery,
 International Law and International Justice    147

genocide, and racial discrimination (Charlesworth 2012: 191). The traditional accounts
of the sources and binding nature of international law are not particularly coherent,
and, as David Kennedy has pointed out, taking them too seriously “places you outside
the terrain of a professional practice that moves easily among consideration of policy,
ethics, and realpolitik strategy in arguing about what norms to follow when” (Kennedy
2016: 157).
For similar reasons, international lawyers have shied away from explicit accounts of
international justice. Few scholars have addressed the nature of international justice in
an abstract sense and how it can be bolstered by legal rules. One exception is Thomas
Franck’s work on fairness, which he presents as a product of both distributive justice
(allocating the burdens and benefits of legal rules equitably) and legitimacy (adherence
to proper processes with respect to the formation and interpretation of the law) (Franck
1995). Franck describes the expectation that

decisions about distributive and other entitlements will be made by those duly
authorised, in accordance with procedures which protect against corrupt, arbi-
trary, or idiosyncratic decision-​making or decision-​executing. The fairness of
international law, as of any other legal system, will be judged, first by the degree
to which the rules satisfy the participants’ expectations of justifiable distribution
of costs and benefits, and secondly by the extent to which the rules are made and
applied in accordance with what the participants perceive as right process. (Franck
1995: 7)

Franck’s understanding of distributive justice is both vague (“broadly conceived

equity”) and relatively narrow, skirting the issue of the deep economic and social div-
ides in the international community. In a similar vein, Steven Ratner has offered a
sustained account of what he terms the “thin justice” of international law, based on his
observations of its “real word” operation: justice is “a process or outcome that assigns
rights and responsibilities to global actors so that it is clear what each such actor is
entitled to do or have” (Ratner 2015: 45). Ratner imports some generalized substantive
values into his procedural account by insisting that justice also requires promotion
of both peace (defined as the absence of armed conflict) and “basic” human rights
(a selection of civil, political, and some social rights), although he acknowledges the
inevitable tensions between them. On this analysis, he endorses the justice of many
foundational international legal rules, such as the qualified prohibition on the use
of force, but finds others—​for example the unrestricted veto power of the current
permanent members of the UN Security Council and international law’s hostility
to secession—​unjust. Ratner’s theory takes the existing state system as a given, and
resists endorsing larger justice schemes for international law, such as global economic
redistribution.
Apart from the rare excursions into theories of justice, the emphasis of international
lawyers has been on designing institutions to resolve disputes and to provide account-
ability for particular categories of actions. Justice, then, has become a particularized
148   Hilary Charlesworth

commodity in the international legal system, the product of specific institutional

processes.
The voluntarist current in international law is evident in the largely optional
nature of international adjudication. Thus the International Court of Justice (ICJ),
established by the UN Charter as “the principal judicial organ of the United Nations”
(Article 92), can assert jurisdiction in disputes between states only when all parties
to the dispute have agreed to it. In 2017, fewer than half the members of the UN (72),
including only one of the permanent members of the Security Council (the United
Kingdom), had accepted the Court’s jurisdiction generally. On the other hand, the
world’s most populous states and the largest economies have been quite willing to
accept adjudication of trade disputes by the World Trade Organization and of dis-
putes over the law of the sea by the UN Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (Kingsbury
2012: 212–​15).
The Statute of the ICJ provides that the Court can, if the parties agree, decide cases not
on the basis of principles of international law but ex aequo et bono (Article 38(2)) or on
the basis of right and good, or equity and conscience as the phrase is sometimes trans-
lated. This possibility acknowledges that legal rules do not always deliver a just outcome.
The fact that the ICJ has never been asked to decide a case ex aequo et bono neverthe-
less illustrates the reluctance of states to allow international courts to venture outside
the confines of legal principle into the uncharted realms of substantive justice. Overall,
international courts and tribunals have followed the approach of Hugo Grotius set out
in De jure belli ac pacis in 1625 that international law should deliver (using Aristotelian
terms) corrective justice, or the reinstatement of the position of the parties before the
disputed transaction, as opposed to distributive justice, which would entail attention
to broader inequalities between the parties (Kingsbury 2012: 221). There are also strik-
ing examples of international injustice associated with international adjudication, such
as the ICJ’s 1966 decision in the South-​West Africa cases. Here the ICJ held that it did
not have the power to adjudicate challenges by Ethiopia and Liberia to South Africa’s
imposition of apartheid in South-​West Africa in its capacity as Mandatory Power under
the League of Nations (ICJ Reports 1966: 6). The decision, ostensibly made on proced-
ural grounds, effectively allowed institutionalized racial discrimination to escape legal
challenge.
While pointing out both the culturally specific, rather than universal, roots of
human rights as well as their lack of efficacy in changing state behaviour, Stephen
Hopgood’s contribution to this Handbook describes the domination of international
justice talk by the human rights movement (see Chapter 23). From an international
legal perspective, however, the development of the international human rights system
has shaped international lawyers’ ideas about justice only in a tentative and halting
manner. Justice and the protection of human rights are not regarded as synonymous.
This may be because the global institutions that monitor human rights commitments
by states, such as the UN Human Rights Council and the specialized human rights
treaty bodies, are based on processes of dialogue and pressure rather than traditional
adjudication.
 International Law and International Justice    149

International Justice as International

Criminal Justice

In the twenty-​first century, the concept of international justice has become associ-
ated largely with international criminal law. This area of law breaks from the trad-
itional mode of regulation of state conduct characteristic of international law to
regulate the behaviour of individuals. It developed from the Nuremberg and Tokyo
trials, organized by the Allies at the end of the Second World War, which attributed
responsibility to individuals for actions deemed international crimes. While some
international lawyers were troubled by the sense that these trials constituted a form
of victors’ justice, the Nuremberg and Tokyo precedents provided a foundation for
the UN Security Council to establish two specialized criminal tribunals almost half
a century later to deal with atrocities committed by all sides during particular armed
conflicts: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1993) and
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994). The work of these tribu-
nals in turn laid the foundation for the adoption in 1998 of the Rome Statute for the
International Criminal Court (ICC). The Statute established a permanent judicial
institution, based in the Hague, which has jurisdiction over three categories of crimes
designated as international crimes because of their seriousness: war crimes, crimes
against humanity, and genocide. A fourth category of international crimes, crimes of
aggression, was added to the Court’s jurisdiction in 2010. The motto of the ICC is
“Peace through justice.”
The form of justice envisaged in the Rome Statute is limited in the sense that it applies
mainly when states agree to its jurisdiction, although it is also possible for the UN
Security Council to refer cases directly to the Court. The Statute relies on the principle
of complementarity. This means that parties to the Court’s Statute are obligated to crim-
inalize the designated behaviour in their national legal systems and to prosecute those
responsible for these crimes. The ICC has jurisdiction only when a state is unable or
unwilling to prosecute breaches of the crimes.
The work of the ICC has become the modern embodiment of international justice,
and it has been widely accepted that “‘passing sentence’ equals ‘doing justice’” (Nouwen
2012: 343). Its practitioners often place great faith in the law as a vehicle for justice
(Tallgren 1999; Koller 2008). But a lively critical tradition in international criminal
law has drawn attention to the limits of the Court (e.g. Burgis-​Kasthala 2017; Mégret
2016; Tallgren 2002). For example, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that the
development of international criminal law and its institutions, with their retributive
model of justice, has deterred international criminal behaviour. A politically sensi-
tive aspect of the work of the ICC is that, in the fifteen years of its existence, the only
cases that it has presided over come from Africa. In 2016 three African states, Burundi,
Gambia, and South Africa, withdrew their acceptance of the ICC Statute because of
the perception of bias. Moreover, the limited number of crimes addressed by the Court
150   Hilary Charlesworth

allows contributing dynamics such as extreme poverty and inequality to be factored out
of judicial deliberations (Nouwen 2012: 343–​4). Indeed, Sarah Nouwen has argued that
institutions of international criminal justice have become

instruments of therapeutic governance, providing an acceptable comprom-

ise between despicable apathy and authorisation of military interventions that
UN members are unwilling or unable to carry out: if not peace, then justice. [ . . . ]
Complex conflicts with intractable structural causes are distilled to individual
agency. Those who are not convicted, for instance those who stood by or benefited,
are absolved by the law’s silence. (Nouwen 2012: 343)

Many groups affected by violence within the ICC’s mandate also regard the ICC’s puni-
tive Western style of justice as undermining the possibility of peace within their com-
munities, supporting instead restorative forms of justice (Nouwen 2016: 757–​9). For
all these reasons, the accounts of justice generated by international criminal law often
reproduce imperial images of a crusading global North prosecuting crimes committed
in the uncivilized global South (Clarke, 2009).

Conclusion

It is striking that international political theorists often reach to the law to frame just-
ice projects. Jürgen Habermas’s faith in the international legal system is an example
(Habermas 2001), as is Jean Cohen’s call to strengthen international law and its institu-
tions (Cohen 2012). For their part, international lawyers, while attached to the language
of justice, tend to be less optimistic about the capacity of law to deliver substantive forms
of justice. The rhetoric of international law places international justice at its heart, but
the forms of justice envisaged in the international legal system are circumscribed. The
forums for the delivery of justice in international law are largely adjudicatory bodies.
While there has been a proliferation of international tribunals and courts over the last
few decades, they have limited jurisdiction in terms of parties and subject matter. Many
issues, such as military and intelligence matters, the governance of the global financial
system, the environment and social violence, are unlikely to attract international judi-
cial attention (Kingsbury 2012: 212). There is, then, a dissonance between the promise
and performance of international law.
In the fields of human rights and transitional justice, scholars have articulated the
concept of “transformative justice,” emphasizing local agency, fair and open processes,
and challenges to unequal and exclusive structures, in order to signal a move away from
the legal arena to the political and social as sites for justice (e.g. Fredman, Kuosmanen,
and Campbell 2016; Gready and Robins 2014). They have also investigated the ways
in which ideas about justice are negotiated in everyday contexts, though contestation
and debate (Clarke 2009: 28). This decentring of law reflects empirical research on its
 International Law and International Justice    151

impact at the international level, showing that law is one among many regulatory influ-
ences in international society (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000: 550–​63). It gains strength
from being woven with other strands to form a web of regulation that can be animated
by networks of actors, but by itself cannot redress injustices based on oppression and
domination.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Anna Saunders for her skilful research assistance, and to the Editors and
Michelle Burgis-​Kasthala for their helpful comments.

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Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press).
 ­c hapter 12

T r ansitiona l J u st i c e

Susanne Buckley-​Z istel

A central concern of International Political Theory (IPT) is to reflect on possibilities

and limits of justice on a global scale. Can notions of justice that work nationally easily
be transferred? Are there shared moral values beyond a locally confined community?
Are there global normative orders which define what counts as just? If yes, where do
they come from and what are their boundaries? These questions are inter alia pertinent
in cases where repression, dictatorship, or violent conflict have led to atrocities that are
perceived as major injustices. Mass killings, torture, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing,
disappearances, and abductions are deeds which offend prevailing moral but also legal
notions of what counts as just. In order to redress these injustices, since the early 1990s
there have been numerous efforts to deal with the legacy of violence. This is commonly
referred to as “transitional justice”—​justice in a phase of political and social transition—​
which incorporates measures to uncover the truth about past crimes, hold perpetrators
accountable, and vindicate the dignity of victims.
Transitional justice has become a global project. With the end of the Cold War, the
opportunity presented itself to generate the normative foundations and institutions
to deliver justice. Since the early 1990s, the quest for accountability for human-​rights
abuses has become enshrined in national institutions, international criminal law, as well
as in the “global consciousness” (Sikkink 2011: 96; see Chapters 22 and 23). The signing
of a peace accord or the end of a dictatorship are often followed by the establishment of
tribunals, truth commissions, memorials, reparation schemes, or lustration processes.
Yet even where these institutions are established and carried through by national gov-
ernmental or civil-​society actors, there is an important relation between this national
scale and global dynamics, in terms both of what transitional justice on the national
level should look like and of how it can prevail on a global scale.
Reading transitional justice through IPT requires investigating if and how the notion
of justice in transitional justice is embedded in particular normative frameworks, as well
as how it relates global and local understandings of justice. To this end, this chapter fol-
lows two interrelated trajectories. On one hand, it analyses what ideas of justice under-
lie the concept of transitional justice and its application in societies of transition. One
154   Susanne Buckley-Zistel

central contention is that transitional justice is made, not found. Its normative founda-
tions are the result of historical developments as well as cultural preferences, and reflect
a series of beliefs which are sometimes in conflict and which often pull in different direc-
tions. On the other hand, this chapter situates transitional justice between the local and
the global by connecting normative assumptions which derive from a concrete locality
with concepts at a global scale, and vice versa. This is in line with the concerns of IPT
(moving the discussion of justice from the national to the global), but it also questions
the meaning of the scales national (local)/​global in and of themselves.
In the following, I first historicize transitional justice in order to illustrate how its
norms have developed over space and time, often due to changing external circum-
stances such as changing forms of violence. I then draw out the normative foundations
of different approaches to justice as central to transitional justice, highlighting how
they relate local (often meaning national) and global scales. This discussion is organ-
ized around three conceptions of justice: retributive, restorative, traditional. I chose
retributive and restorative justice since they are currently the dominant concepts. Yet
I also investigate traditional justice in order to point to more recent developments of
localizing transitional justice, both in academia and practice, as well as to move beyond
so-​called Western normative frameworks.

Historicizing Transitional Justice

In her conceptual history of transitional justice, Paige Arthur dates the emergence of
transitional justice to the late 1980s/​early 1990s when the term was first used, i.e. to a
climate where transition to democracy was the dominant normative perspective from
which to analyse political and social change (Arthur 2009: 325). In this first phase,
transitional justice was mainly concerned with the legacy of authoritarian, repressive
regimes so that transition to democracy seemed appropriate. Due to this focus on dem-
ocracy, a particular understanding of justice emerged amongst an epistemic community
of practitioners and academics from around the world who met at many conferences
and conventions, promoting some measures such as truth-​seeking and retributive pun-
ishment while excluding others such as redistribution and other forms of distributive
justice. Consequently, transitional justice, at least in its early expressions, was concerned
with political and civil rights and not with structural violence or social injustices, or,
legally speaking, with violations of economic, social, and cultural rights.
In addition to facilitating transitions, one objective of this epistemic community was
thus to provide some form of justice for people whose rights had been abused by repres-
sive regimes. This emergence goes hand in hand with the increasing importance of
human rights from the 1970s onwards (Moyn 2010), replacing earlier left-​wing political
activism which had declined due to an disillusionment with revolutionary political pro-
jects in the Americas, Africa, and the Soviet Union, and prompting a turn to individual
rights in lieu of socialist ideologies (Arthur 2009: 339.). This has given way to a strong
 Transitional Justice   155

court-​centred, legalistic orientation of the field and, eventually, to the establishment

of various ad hoc, hybrid, and international tribunals, most noticeably the permanent
International Criminal Court (ICC), to punish so-​called international crimes including
crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression. This focus
on prosecuting and punishing individual perpetrators has, in many ways, eventually led
to a depoliticizing of human rights (Hopgood 2013).
Changes in the forms of violence led to changes in the forms of transitional justice.
With the increase of civil wars in the 1990s, the field was confronted with new dilemmas
of war-​torn and deeply divided societies, requiring new orientation. Questions of just-
ice were not easily solved in contexts where all parties committed human-​rights abuses,
and, while democracy remained an end of transition, reconciliation, and nation-​build-
ing became important objectives too. This led to the expansion from retributive justice
through tribunals—​which continue to play an important role—​and the uncovering of
truth in cultures of impunity, to the designing of truth commissions with a strong focus
on national reconciliation, as well as a growth of measures such as apologies and repar-
ations. In short, it expanded retributive justice with restorative justice. Importantly, this
shift ties in with wider notions of liberal peace-​building of which transitional justice is
now an essential component. The context of post-​conflict societies has often sparked
debates about peace vs justice, for in some cases these goals seemed incompatible—​for
instance when rebel leaders refused to attend the signing of a peace accord for fear of
being arrested by the ICC (such as the case in Uganda) or the political climate seemed
too fragile for a rigorous prosecution of perpetrators (such as the case of post-​apartheid
South Africa).
This shift to restorative justice has turned the field more local, away from grand insti-
tutionalized structures to the concerns of people directly affected by violence, and espe-
cially to the concerns of victims who did not feature much in the early phases (Bonacker
2013). Furthermore, due to some disillusionment with the reach of externally induced
or imported transitional justice mechanisms such as retributive tribunals or restorative
truth commissions, as well as a trend to promote local ownership, there has been a turn
to assess and promote justice mechanisms that already exist within the particular soci-
ety concerned. This is often referred to as “traditional justice,” and finds expression inter
alia in the Gacaca tribunals in Rwanda and Mato Oput in the Acholi region of northern
Uganda.
Observing the evolution of transitional justice, Thomas Obel Hansen suggests that
the field has recently experienced two significant expansions: horizontal and verti-
cal (Hansen 2014). Horizontally, it has become increasingly more international—​or
global—​in particular due to the establishment of the ICC. At the same time, it has turned
more local to consider the perspective from below, from places where individuals and
groups live with the legacy of violence, indicating a spatial expansion. Vertically, tran-
sitional justice now does not only comprise transitions to liberal (or in some cases
illiberal) regimes; it also functions as a vehicle for peace-​building and reconciliation,
indicating a conceptual or normative expansion. Both normative and spatial aspects
will be considered in the following.
156   Susanne Buckley-Zistel

Retributive Justice

Retributive justice holds that a particular (violent) action needs to be responded to

by punishment, and that this breach of a law requires the offender to suffer in return.
Importantly, the action is considered to offend a law, not the person who has been
harmed. The definition of the offence and the social reaction to it are based on codified
law, rendering this approach highly legalistic.
For Ruti Teitel, the birthplaces of international retributive justice are the tribunals
of Nuremberg and Tokyo following the Second World War (Teitel 2003: 70); it is here
where this form of international legalism emerged. Subsequently, a number of courts
and tribunals have been set up and international criminal law has been refined and pro-
gressively codified, finding its current expression in the Rome Statute of 2002 on which
the ICC is founded. Despite its global reach, retributive justice is, however, not univer-
sal but originates from a particular geographic location commonly referred to as “the
West.” In other words, it is the projection of a particular locality, situated in particu-
lar traditions, experiences, and cultural milieus, onto a global scale (Gibson-​Graham
2003: 51).
Yet what does legalism signify? For Judith Shklar, it is “the ethical attitude that holds
moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of
duties and rights determined by law” (Shklar 1964: 1). Legalism is enshrined in per-
sonal behaviour, philosophical thought, political ideologies, and social institutions;
it is often unarticulated, but shapes conduct. Critically she thus points to the often-​
universalized logic of law by the legal profession and its efforts in promoting universal
justice, unmasking it as one ideology amongst others (p. 3). From this perspective, it is
appropriate to create tribunals in order to enforce international criminal law, to uphold
criminal accountability even to the detriment of peace processes, and to trust that elites
and masses can be persuaded to comply with its international norms (Vinjamuri and
Snyder 2004: 346). The crucial aims of legalism are to set, enforce, and further develop
international law, to demonstrate the force of law, and to expand the global reach of
judicial institutions such as the ICC. What is pervasive about this approach—​and what
Shklar unmasks—​is that its universalist aspiration makes it appear to be free of ideology
(a mere following of rules) and thus apolitical. Responding to atrocities through legal-
ism is thus a must; it is beyond political calculations and interests; justice is isolated and
immune from power and politics.
Regarding its normative foundations, this legalist form of justice can be subsumed
under the heading of liberalism and liberalism’s teleological assumptions about its
potential for fostering cooperation, building international institutions, and, ultimately,
providing peace. Liberal approaches argue that regimes and institutional cooperation
“constrain state behaviour by formalizing the expectations of each party to an agreement
where there is a shared interest. [ . . . ] Regimes also enhance trust, continuity and sta-
bility in a world of ungoverned anarchy” (Burchill 2013: 65). The signing of multilateral
 Transitional Justice   157

treaties such as the Rome Statue of the ICC by 139 states,1 the creation of various inter-
national and hybrid courts and tribunals, and the growing network of international gov-
ernmental and non-​governmental organizations, it is assumed, assist in enhancing the
cooperation between states and non-​state actors in order to reduce conflict. This goes
hand in hand with the striving for one particular political order—​democracy—​with
strong institutions and the rule of law as guarantees for national and international peace.
According to Teitel, there has been a normative shift in the focus of the legal tradition
from the state as a reference object to the human, giving way to what she calls “human-
ity’s law” (Teitel 2008: 677). She refers to the influence of global legalists who seek to
move beyond the nation-​state and traditional sovereignty through law, and to deter-
ritorialize legal norms, putting the individual, rather than the state, centre stage. The
emergence of international criminal justice is seen as an important element of such
“humanization” of international relations (IR). She further argues that “[t]‌he drive to
normalize and generalize international criminal responsibility of individuals reflects a
faith in the possibility of international law to reflect and to realize foundational social
morality” (p. 668). Despite the supposedly apolitical and positivist framing by legalism,
the spread of international criminal justice—​and by implication transitional justice—​is
thus also highly moralistic.
In IR, legalism and liberalism have been accused of being ignorant of political inter-
ests and power—​an argument which has recently been expanded to include inter-
national criminal law on which much retributive justice in transitional justice is based
(Keohane 2012: 129). Without wanting to rehearse IR’s big debates, it is instructive to
explore how transitional justice by legal means is framed normatively and used politic-
ally. This is, for instance, apparent in the often-​cited aims of retributive justice and their
curative powers (Andrieu 2014: 91): to establish the truth, to educate the public about
past abuses, to promote a shared understanding, to (re)build the rule of law, to produce
a societal consensus regarding the intolerability of the atrocities, to end human-​rights
violations, to promote national reconciliation, and to (re-​)establish the dignity of the
victims. In this sense, Kora Andrieu argues, transitional justice trials do not correspond
to a legalistic neutral stance but are rather a means towards an end, namely, promoting a
democratic transition (Andrieu 2014). They are used in societies in transition in order to
further a concrete aim which is political, not legal, but which is rarely recognized.
Legalism and its liberal premises have also been criticized for focusing too much on
institutions to the detriment of social actors (Andrieu 2010), and for being state-​centric
and top-​down rather than emerging from below (McEvoy 2007: 421). This might be in
conflict with the ambition of courts and tribunals to have some effect on social rela-
tions in a divided society—​both within the country and abroad—​for they might not
receive much attention from the people concerned (Pham and Vinck 2007). Another
related criticism against retributive justice relates to its geographic origin, and concerns
its appropriateness for different cultural contexts, i.e. it is critical of its universalistic
tendency. Legal proceedings in particular, it is contended, have little relevance for the
people for whom justice has a different meaning (as discussed below), which influences
if and how such proceedings are accepted (Buckley-​Zistel et al. 2016; Mieth 2016).
158   Susanne Buckley-Zistel

Moreover, it has been remarked that this form of transitional justice seeks to turn peo-
ple into liberal subjects in form of autonomous citizens imbued with freedom, equality,
and rights who engage in democratic, juridical, and political practice (Hinton 2011: 8).
The privileging of individual over group rights as enshrined in a liberal approach might,
however, not be appropriate for non-​Western cultures (Sriram 2009: 199). Scholarship
on and from the global South cast doubt on the appropriateness of this individualistic
element of retributive justice in contexts where restorative justice might be more cultur-
ally suitable, and where the objective of justice is less the punishment of the perpetrator
than the restitution of social and community relations (Mani 2002), to which we turn
below.
This brief analysis shows how retributive justice is firmly embedded in a legalistic
and liberal tradition with merits and limits in dealing with the legacy of a violent past.
Despite its universalistic aspirations and global reach, it is rooted in time and space. This
provides important insights into how global and local relate to each other since, instead
of being a global phenomenon, retributive justice is merely the projection of a local idea
onto a global scale. This suggests that what we consider to be global is simply the hegem-
ony of a particular locality (Ernesto Laclau, referred to in Gibson-​Graham 2003: 52).

Restorative Justice

A second understanding of justice in the context of transitional justice is restorative.

In contrast to retributive justice, restorative justice does not seek to punish but to (re-​)
establish the relationships between victims and perpetrators (if they can be easily dif-
ferentiated); it considers a crime to be an offence against a person (not a law), and in
contrast to a criminal case it is not necessarily formalized or adversarial. It aims for rec-
onciliation, as well as the rehabilitation of victim and perpetrator, and often involves
the wider community. Its merits, it is argued, are that due to the direct encounter vic-
tims have their suffering recognized by the perpetrators, which leads to some form of
personal healing and possibly closure, while perpetrators understand their wrongdoing
and will refrain from repetition. Advocates of restorative justice hold that these char-
acteristics make it particularly suitable for transitional contexts of divided societies in
which mending relations—​both interpersonal and societal—​is a requirement for sup-
porting a peace process (Lambourne 2009). Similar to the liberal notion of legalism dis-
cussed above the objective is thus to contribute to peace, here by focusing not on the
individual but on communities.
Although other transitional-​ justice mechanisms can also be categorized as
restorative—​such as symbolic and material reparations—​for the sake of clarity in the
following I shall mainly refer to truth commissions. Many (though not all) truth com-
missions have a focus on restoration, and some even carry the word “reconciliation” in
their title, as in South Africa, Colombia, Chile, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Truth commissions are temporary institutions which collect testimonies of people who
 Transitional Justice   159

have either experienced or observed violence, in order to identify patterns of atrocities

and to publish them in form of a final report, often with recommendations for prevent-
ing future violence.
One outcome of the encounter between victims and perpetrators is “the truth.” While
it is a commonplace to argue that there is no such thing as the truth, the South African
commission has identified four different kinds of truths that emerged in its process: fac-
tual or forensic truth; personal or narrative truth; social or dialogue truth; and heal-
ing and restorative truth (TRC 1998). As a concept of justice, restorative justice is hence
strongly constructivist: it seeks to construct a new social reality through the encoun-
ter of victims and perpetrators who transcends their animosity. For Christine Bell and
Catherine O’Rourke, it can be understood as a form of Habermasian discourse ethics
(Bell and O’Rourke 2007: 40) in which a shared reality (truth) emerges in an undis-
turbed communication. Since they highlight the benefits of the approach from a femin-
ist perspective (see Chapter 42), they focus on women who have experienced violence.
They stress the accessibility and flexibility of truth commissions (in contrast to courts)
and their ability to address victims needs which might reduce the threshold for women
to participate. The constructivist element of restorative justice opens a window for con-
structing a more gender-​just society in the future (for instance through recommenda-
tions in the final report of the commissions). Yet they also emphasize that this attempt
might go wrong, and that the restoring aspect runs the risk of restoring previous asym-
metrical gender structures in the society. As often argued in the context of IR and com-
municative ethics, there is no such thing as an undisturbed communication (Hutchings
2005), and in divided societies in particular the political, social, but also economic
asymmetries might manifest themselves in mandates, target groups, selection of time-​
frame and rights to be addressed, and so on, giving some groups the opportunity to
engage while excluding others.
Due to the ambition of restorative justice to have a societal impact, the question
emerges: transition to what? The early truth commissions had a strong focus on polit-
ical and civil rights which led to much criticism, particularly in contexts such as South
Africa, where the violence during Apartheid was strongly structural, depriving the
majority of the population of basic rights. This has given rise to a vibrant debate about
distributive justice as part of transitional justice and the increasing inclusion of eco-
nomic, social, and cultural rights in truth commissions. Morocco (2004–​5) was the first
commission to issue reparations not to individuals but collectively to social groups, rec-
ognizing their previous marginalization and boosting their economic status to render
them more potent actors on the national level.
As stated in the introduction, even though measures such as truth commissions are
implemented on a national scale, they have a strong global dimension, for they are
firmly anchored in international institutions such as UNDP which fund them, as well
as in an epistemic community consisting of donors, academics, consultants, and think-​
tanks from around the world. Their exchange encourages a form of collective learning
which establishes truth commissions as the adequate cultural model to address human
rights abuses globally (Krüger 2014: 18–​19). For instance, transitional justice experts
160   Susanne Buckley-Zistel

often travel from one truth commission to another, carrying with them their norma-
tive agendas and their (supposedly) technical approaches to establishing such an insti-
tution, which informs the work of the succeeding commission (Buckley-​Zistel 2016a).
This example thus also prompts reflection on how global/​local (national) relate to each
other, for here too the boundaries between the scales are fluid. As stated with reference
to retributive justice, the local (national) strongly informs global norms, while at the
same time transferring global norms to the local level.

Traditional Justice

“Traditional justice” refers to alternative dispute resolution as grounded in the cus-

toms of a particular society or social group where it has been practised for some time.
It resembles the logic of restorative justice in that it strives to mend the relationships
between the parties to the conflict. Often, it consists of informal consultations by a
council of elders who meet when called for, and it is mainly oral. The counsel might call
for some form of material compensation to the victim (e.g. an animal) and/​or initiate a
ritual in which the parties to the conflict engage with each other (e.g. eating or drink-
ing out of the same bowl) or in which they are purified or cleansed (e.g. ritual washing,
stepping on eggs). Importantly, and in contrast to the retributive justice outlined above,
much (yet not all) traditional justice is highly spiritual, and attributes the higher power
of justice to gods or deities which have to be pleased in form of sacrifices, rituals, or cere-
monies which follow a particular cultural code and are thus not transferable.
The term “traditional” is somewhat misleading, for it suggests that customary law is
frozen and does not change over time (Huyse and Salter 2008: 8). Like all social practice,
though, it is not immune from internal and external influence—​for instance from colo-
nialism to the current practices of international donors—​and thus highly dynamic. To
illustrate, institutions such as the Gacaca tribunals in Rwanda that deal with the legacy
of the 1994 genocide have changed considerably, and today resemble hybrids between
the (still operating) initial forms on one hand and formal legal proceeding on the other.
They differ from mechanism of traditional justice in the narrow sense, since they pres-
ent case files for the accused and punish according to a national legal code.
Traditional justice has gained some traction in the context of transitional justice for a
number of reasons. For a start, it is much more accessible to people who cannot afford to
go through legal processes or formalized procedures of restorative justice, both monet-
arily and due to the remoteness of their place of residence. In some contexts corruption
abounds, and initiating court cases (and sometimes, prior to this, filing a complaint by
the police) requires bribes and/​or clientelist relationships. In addition, it is an alternative
to Western legalism, and potentially more suitable for local contexts where it ties to pre-
vailing norms and cultural knowledge. Low in costs and spontaneous to set up, custom-
ary law is accessible to a wider range of people. Based on the criticism against tribunals
and courts as stipulated above, traditional justice is a means to make visible resources
already present in post-​violence societies to deal with its legacy. Rather than being
 Transitional Justice   161

inposed from the outside, people affected can draw on their own resources, enhancing
their sense of ownership and potentially the impact of the justice measure.
There is a risk, though, of romanticizing the local and seeing it as the panacea for all
problems relating to externally induced justice post-​violence (Björkdahl and Höglund
2013: 290; Boesenecker and Vinjamuri 2011). It is important to note that the judging
body—​the council of elders—​is not beyond social and political influence, and that its
decisions might reflect community tensions and power asymmetries. In contrast to
retributive justice, people involved have no legal code or procedural guarantees to turn
to in order to have their voices heard and their concerns considered. Also, many coun-
cils comprise of elderly men—​wise persons of integrity—​reflecting wider gender and
other power imbalances in the societies. Moreover, customary dispute resolution is gen-
erally made for smaller offences like theft of cattle or individual murder, and not for the
enormity of violations that are committed in the context of civil or insurgency wars,
let alone genocide.
International transitional-​justice entrepreneurs as well as scholars have been drawn
to traditional justice due to its promise to go beyond a Western-​centric notion which is
considered to be culturally inappropriate, marking a moment of resistance against the
constitutive effect of global norms. They adopt a research and advocacy position from
below (McEvoy and McGregor 2008; Mieth 2016) so that place-​based approaches have
become popular in some corners of transitional-​justice research (Shaw and Waldorf
2010). This view is in congruence with the post-​colonial critique of power and repre-
sentation in North–​South relations more generally, where Eurocentric models are put
under scrutiny (Dhawan et al. 2016; Sabaratnam 2013), leading to an almost sudden dis-
covery of the local. Importantly, the criticism suggests that the local remains import-
ant for people, in the context of transitional justice and beyond, and that they have the
potential to offer solutions out of their own resources, providing them with agency
rather than pathologizing their war-​torn condition.
That the local is never without global influence—​and vice versa—​is also apparent
regarding traditional justice, where international donors fund some of the customary
dispute resolution projects, heavily influencing their practices (Meier 2011). This leads
to hybrid forms of justice, in terms of both process and outcome. “Hybridity” refers
to the “composite forms of practice, norms and thinking that emerge from the inter-
action of different groups, worldviews and activity” (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012: 3).
It stresses that societies are the result of complex processes of negotiation, mainly in a
subtle, long-​term fashion in everyday life. Importantly, it implies that global and local
cannot be maintained as discrete entities but that, as in our particular case, traditional
justice is the result of numerous internal and external influences.

Conclusions

This chapter followed two objectives: to disclose the normative assumptions under-
lying transitional justice—​
represented by retributive, restorative, and traditional
162   Susanne Buckley-Zistel

approaches—​and to illustrate how these approaches continuously interlink the local (or
national) and the global in their strife for justice. Regarding the first, all three versions
of justice discussed are based on a particular understanding of what justice should look
like and how it should be achieved. In retributive justice, an offence is equalized with
punishment and there is a strong adherence to law, rendering the process supposedly
apolitical. Even though it is firmly based in Western liberal thought, it claims univer-
sality, rendering global that which derives from a particular place. In terms of its appli-
cation, it is also truly global through its codification in international criminal law and
its materialization in form of international courts and tribunals that prosecute serious
human rights abuses. Restorative justice, in contrast, aims at repairing and (re-​)estab-
lishing the relationship between the parties to the conflict, and hence at some form of
reconciliation. Often associated with truth commissions, it has a strong constructivist
orientation, since it seeks to establish the truth about the past in form of an encounter
between the parties. Even though they are carried out nationally, truth commissions
are tightly knitted into an international network of consultants and advisers who travel
from one commission to another, carrying with them a set of norms that can be traced
from one commission to the next. Traditional justice, finally, has some similarities with
restorative justice regarding its objectives of restoring community relations, but is often
couched in spiritual terms. It takes place in the small confines of local communities, yet
remains connected to the global through international donor networks and academic
interests that see it as a local solution for local problems.
Concerning the second objective, the discussion illustrates that the scales of local/​
global cannot be delineated and separated out as ahistorical container concepts, but
that they mutually influence each other (Buckley-​Zistel 2016b). It also illustrates that
what has sparked off the initial endeavours of International Political Theory—​i.e. to
discuss if and how there can be a normative framework of justice beyond the state
(Caney 2006; see Chapters 8 and 9)—​is now called into question by looking at tran-
sitional justice as an empirical phenomenon, contributing to our understanding of
notions of justice beyond the state. Rather than one justice, a number of different (tran-
sitional) justices abound, and even in cases where they appear to deliver justice in a
locally confined space, they are always already situated in global structures through
both the influence on the normative foundations and the actual implementation of the
measures.
Reading transitional justice through the lens of IPT illustrates that there are different,
competing notions of what counts as just. Even though nationally emerging concep-
tions may reach a global relevance, they merely elevate the hegemonic understanding
of this particular locality so that local and global normative orders of what counts as
just cannot be delineated but always stand in a relation to each other. In the aftermath
of repression, dictatorship, and violent conflict, they are negotiated between here and
there—​they are in a constant flux.
As I draw this conclusion to a close (November 2016), Russia has withdrawn its sig-
nature from the Rome Statute, and Burundi, South Africa, and Gambia are also turning
their backs on the ICC. This rupture in what was considered the triumph of retributive
 Transitional Justice   163

transitional justice—​prosecuting international crimes on a global level, a global court—​

testifies to the ambivalences such processes entail, and to their constant flux.

Note
1. Coalition for the International Criminal Court, “A Universal Court with Global Support,”
<http://​www.iccnow.org/​?mod=romesignatures>, accessed 13 Oct. 2016.

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Buckley-​Zistel, S. (2016a). Truth Commissions, Human Rights and Gender. In T. Debiel,
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(Berlin: Springer), 1–​23.
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 ­c hapter 13

M inorit y Ri g h ts

Will Kymlicka

Throughout much of the twentieth century, international political theory (IPT)

focused on the debate between realists and moralists about whether normative prin-
ciples could sensibly be applied to international relations, or whether international rela-
tions were ultimately a matter of realpolitik and “might makes right.” In his prescient
1992 book International Relations Theory, Chris Brown argued that IPT needed to move
beyond that debate, to instead focus on what sorts of normative principles can illumin-
ate international relations, and more specifically, on the choice between “cosmopolitan”
and “communitarian” conceptions of international justice. This has indeed come to
pass: the field of IPT today is dominated by debates between cosmopolitans and their
statist critics (see Chapter 3).1
The issue of minority rights, however, provides an exception to this trajectory.
Minority rights are largely ignored by both cosmopolitans and statists. This is partly
because international debates on minority rights remain driven by raison d’état: even
those who agree that international relations should generally be guided by normative
principles tend to revert to a realist framework when discussing minority rights. But it
is also partly because neither cosmopolitanism nor statism as currently theorized is well
equipped to evaluate the normative claims at stake in many minority rights issues. To
incorporate minority rights within IPT may require overcoming blind spots within both
frameworks. Or so I will argue.
I will begin by discussing how the “minority question” arose as an issue within inter-
national relations—​that is, why minorities have been seen as a problem and a threat to
international order—​and how international actors have historically attempted to con-
tain the problem, often in ways that were deeply unjust to minorities. I will then con-
sider recent efforts to advance a pro-​minority agenda at the international level, and how
this agenda helps reveal some of the limits of both cosmopolitan and statist approaches
to IPT.
 Minority Rights   167

The Minority Question

in International Relations

The rise of the nation-​state has often been catastrophic for ethnic and religious minor-
ities. Consider the Balkans and the Middle East. For some 1,500 years, a panoply of eth-
nic, linguistic, and religious communities lived side by side under both the Byzantine
and Ottoman empires. Yet ever since these empires were replaced with nation-​states,
we have witnessed a terrible “unmixing of peoples,” due to civil wars, ethnic cleansing,
genocide, and forced assimilation. Inter-​communal relations of tolerance and convivi-
ality that had survived for centuries were torn apart in a few short decades under the
nation-​state.2
These conflicts are often described as evidence of “ancient ethnic hatreds,” but in fact
they are the result of the rise of the modern nation-​state, whose very logic turns “minor-
ities” into a “problem.” It is worth noting that none of the ethnic or religious groups
in the Byzantine and Ottoman empires were considered “minorities,” in part because
there was no “majority.” These empires did not rule in the name of a particular majority
nation, but rather ruled as a dynasty over all their diverse subjects. These multi-​ethnic
dynastic empires have now been swept away by the rise of nation-​states, each of which
claims to rule in the name of a particular people or nation. (What was once the territory
of the Ottoman empire now comprises 43 such nation-​states.) Romania, for example,
gained independence in the name of the self-​determination of the Romanian nation.
The Romanian people were seen as having a legitimate right to govern themselves
and their national territory, and the Romanian state is the means through which the
Romanian people exercise those legitimate aspirations. And the creation of a Romanian
nation-​state meant, inevitably, the creation of “minorities”—​namely, all those living on
the territory of the Romanian state at the time of independence who were not seen as
members of the Romanian nation, such as the ethnic Hungarians and Ukrainians.3
This new status—​being a minority within someone else’s nation-​state—​has proven
to be precarious. Minorities pose a persistent existential threat to state legitimacy. Each
nation-​state’s claim to sovereignty flows from the claim that it represents “the people” in
whose name it governs. It is therefore destabilizing of a state’s legitimacy to have a group
within the boundaries of the state who think of themselves as forming or belonging to
a distinct people. If the boundaries of Romania incorporate territory that is tradition-
ally settled by Hungarians or Ukrainians, and is part of the historic homeland of the
Hungarian and Ukrainian people, what gives Romania the right to rule those inhabit-
ants and those territories?
Minorities, therefore, are a “problem” in a world of nation-​states: they pose a chal-
lenge to a nation-​state’s legitimacy. Nor is this unique to Europe. Consider New World
states in the Americas. These states are the products of settler colonialism, built on the
lands of indigenous peoples. What gives settler states the right to rule over indigenous
peoples and their historic homelands? Virtually all countries around the world face
168   Will Kymlicka

some version of this challenge—​the state governs in the name of a particular people but
includes communities and territory that could be seen as belonging to another people or
nation.
As a result, minorities are “marked” citizens: they don’t fully belong to the nation, and
may be deemed presumptively disloyal. This is particularly true where minorities share
an ethnic identity with a neighbouring state, such as the ethnic Hungarians in Romania.
They are often assumed to be a fifth column whose true loyalty lies with their “mother
country.” This fear of minority disloyalty is often deliberately whipped up by political
actors—​scapegoating “aggressive” and “disloyal” minorities is a staple of populist polit-
ics around the world. But it is also true that minorities have been used as tools of inter-​
state rivalry: states often try to weaken a neighbouring state by fomenting discontent
and rebellion amongst its minorities. And minorities have sometimes collaborated with
this external manipulation: the ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland were enthusiastic
supports of Nazi aggression against Czechoslovakia.
From the beginning of the era of nation-​states, therefore, the minority question
has been a concern of the international community, primarily for realpolitik reasons.
Minorities pose a threat to state legitimacy and to international peace, and the task has
been to contain this threat. But what can the international community do to manage the
minority question? There is no single answer to this question. Views about the appro-
priate role of international actors in addressing state–​minority relations have evolved
over time, often in ad hoc ways in response to specific crises, with little consistency. But
we can identify a shift over the twentieth century in a pro-​minority direction, tied to
broader developments in international norms, including the human-​rights revolution.

From Minority Problem

to Minority Rights

When the minority question first arose at the international level, the initial reaction was
to strengthen the hand of the state and to weaken minorities. Since minorities were a
stain on state legitimacy, and a potential threat to inter-​state peace, the obvious solu-
tion was to eliminate, or at least to weaken, these minorities. And if necessary, coercive
means could be employed to achieve this, including expulsions, population exchanges,
or other forms of “demographic engineering” (e.g. encouraging large numbers of the
majority group to settle in the minority’s homeland), or forced assimilation—​in short,
the “unmixing of peoples.” This approach dominated international relations in the first
half of the twentieth century.
Some of these measures were acknowledged to be harsh, even inhumane. The popu-
lation exchange between Greece and Turkey after the First World War, or the expul-
sion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland after the Second World War,
involved uprooting centuries-​old communities. Few denied that this involved injustice
 Minority Rights   169

to minorities, who were sacrificed in the name of stabilizing the international order.
However, it was widely felt that the needs of minorities must be subordinated to the
larger interest in “making the national state secure, and its institutions stable, even at
the cost of obliterating minority cultures and imposing homogeneity upon the popula-
tion” (Claude 1955: 80–​1). It was seen as essential to weaken the capacity of minorities to
challenge state power, either domestically or internationally (Jackson-​Preece 1998: 43).
And so the international community generally condoned coercive measures to weaken
minorities, on the ground that there was no other way to stabilize nation-​states. And
since virtually every state faced some version of this challenge, states accorded each
other wide latitude in deciding how to address their “minority problem.” States did not
want to tie each other’s hands too tightly in determining how best to do so.4
Over the past 50 years, however, we can see a shift towards a more minority-​friendly
approach. This is partly due to broader changes in international norms, including the
human-​rights revolution and the decolonization movement. Treating minorities as
marked citizens to be contained and suppressed conflicted with evolving ideas about
the rights of individuals and communities. For one thing, many anti-​minority policies
violated basic individual civil and political rights (e.g. bans on the use of minority lan-
guages). These policies also conflicted with evolving international ideas about the equal-
ity of races and peoples, tied to decolonization struggles, the African-​American struggle
for desegregation, and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. What all of these
struggles had in common was the repudiation of ideologies of ethnic and racial hier-
archy: a legitimate state cannot espouse supremacist ideologies about the superiority of
some people over others. The coercive suppression of minorities was often intimately
tied up with such supremacist ideologies. This is clearest in the way settler states justi-
fied their rule over indigenous peoples, which rested on claims about the superiority of
“civilized” whites over “backward” indigenous peoples. But this is hardly unique: dom-
inant groups around the world have claimed some form of civilizational superiority over
minorities, in part to justify their right to rule over them.
In short, older models of minority suppression became increasingly untenable,
at odds with emerging ideas of individual human rights and the equality of races and
peoples. And so, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed efforts to formulate new approaches to
minorities, at both the domestic and international level. Domestically, various countries
started to experiment with models of multiculturalism, which granted official recogni-
tion to minorities and accepted that they are a permanent and valued part of the polit-
ical community.5 Internationally, proposals were made to formulate new international
standards of minority and indigenous rights. Proposals to establish new international
standards for the treatment of minorities initially ran into strong headwinds in the 1970s
and 1980s, due to lingering fears that recognition of minorities destabilized state claims
to legitimacy. But by the early 1990s, a wide range of international organizations came
to believe that the tendency of states to try to secure their legitimacy by suppressing
minorities was counterproductive, generating cycles of instability and violence. This
seemed particularly true of newly independent or newly democratizing states (Snyder
2000). To preserve international peace and security, new approaches were needed, in
170   Will Kymlicka

which minorities would be accepted and could feel a sense of belonging, rather than
being marked as disloyal outsiders.
This has led to the proliferation of new international declarations, conventions,
and recommendations regarding minority and indigenous rights. A partial list would
include:

• UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious

or Linguistic Minorities (1992)
• UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007)
• International Labour Organization Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and
Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (1989)
• Council of Europe European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992)
• Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities (1995)
• Organization of American States Proposed American Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples (1997)
• OSCE Lund Recommendations on Effective Participation of National Minorities
(1999)
• UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001)

Taken together, these international instruments represent a radical rethinking of one of

the most fundamental features of the international order: a shift from seeing minorities
as a threat to state legitimacy to seeing them as the bearers of internationally protected
rights. And this in turn has required articulating new models of political community
and of citizenship, in which diversity is seen, not as a liability, but as a constitutive fea-
ture of a truly “modern” state. In its flagship Human Development Report in 2004,
for example, the United Nations advocated for models of “multicultural democracy”
(UNDP 2004) as the framework within which to promote development, peace, and
justice. While other actors prefer other terms—​in Latin America, “intercultural” and
“plurinational” are preferred to “multicultural”—​the basic idea remains: to be accepted
as a member in good standing of the international community today, a state must affirm
both the diversity of its citizens and the equality of its races and peoples. Indeed, we can
say that these pro-​minority and pro-​diversity ideas are now part of “world culture,” in
the sense popularized by Meyer. According to Meyer, the postwar period has witnessed
the “rise of global models of nationally organized progress and justice” which articu-
late the appropriate goals of state action, such as economic development and individual
rights, while delegitimizing older goals, such as the pursuit of divine missions, or racial
and religious purity (Meyer et al. 1997). While Meyer did not include respect for diver-
sity in his original account of the core values of world culture, others have shown that it
has indeed become equally pervasive—​as measured, for example, by the spread of ideas
of multiculturalism and minority rights in school textbooks around the world (Terra
and Bromley 2012).
 Minority Rights   171

Minority Rights within IPT

Viewed from a distance, all these international instruments reflect a general pro-​
minority trend, but viewed more closely, they are puzzling both in the categories they
use and in the rights they attribute. For example, these instruments rely heavily on a
distinction between “indigenous peoples” and “national minorities,” but it is not clear
why these two types of groups are so sharply distinguished, or whether it is even possible
to draw the distinction in various regions of the world (Kymlicka 2011). There are also
seeming inconsistencies in the ways particular rights are discussed—​for example, it is
notoriously difficult to figure out what these instruments actually imply about language
rights or autonomy rights.
I discuss these conceptual puzzles elsewhere (Kymlicka 2007), but for our purposes,
what is striking is how little these developments have entered mainstream IPT. It is diffi-
cult to think of any major work in IPT—​cosmopolitan or statist—​that has grappled with
international norms of minority or indigenous rights, or explored how they relate to
broader theories of international justice. These norms address fundamental issues about
rights of self-​government, political participation, territorial rights, and control over
resources, and as such, are potentially relevant to a wide range of IPT debates on issues
such as global democracy, global distributive justice, human rights, migration and refu-
gees, and war and peace. Yet few if any IPT authors writing on these issues consider how
minority and indigenous rights fit into their theories.
This absence is revealing. International norms of minority and indigenous rights are
passed over in silence, I believe, because they do not fit well into either statist or cosmo-
politan frameworks. Let’s start with cosmopolitans. Cosmopolitans often cite the mis-
treatment of minorities and indigenous peoples as evidence of the flaws of the existing
world order of sovereign nation-​states. They argue—​as I argued earlier—​that organizing
the world on the principle that “nations” or “peoples” have inherent rights to sovereign
statehood will inevitably put minorities in a vulnerable position. But while cosmopol-
itans express sympathy with minorities, and use their plight to condemn the statist sta-
tus quo, it’s not clear that they can endorse the remedies that minorities and indigenous
peoples themselves seek, including the sorts of international protections listed earlier.
Much depends on how we define cosmopolitanism. One strand of cosmopolitanism
is what Kolers calls “terrestrial cosmopolitanism”: the idea that the world was given in
common to all human beings, and that all individuals therefore have an equal right to
the global commons (Kolers 2013). This typically generates very strong individual rights
to mobility, and only weak collective rights to territory. Everyone has the right to move
freely across the globe, in part because no one has the right to exclude them: no individ-
ual or group can claim exclusive possession of territory. Kolers distinguishes this ter-
restrial cosmopolitanism from what he calls “right to place” theories. The latter idea, on
Kolers’ definition, is not “an equal right to the whole world, but an equal right, individ-
ual or collective, to possess a particular place” (Kolers 2013).
172   Will Kymlicka

As Kolers notes, this contrast between terrestrial cosmopolitans and “right to place”
theorists is a fundamental dividing line in contemporary political philosophy. The
debate is not about whether we have obligations of justice to consider the interests of
non-​members outside our territory. The debate, rather, is about what those interests
are. On the one hand, we have interests as individuals in unhindered mobility, includ-
ing the right to move out of our existing community and into the territory of another
community—​an interest that can only be satisfied if we prevent communities from
restricting in-​migration. On the other hand, we have interests as members of bounded
communities in being able to effectively govern ourselves and pursue our shared way of
life on our territory—​an interest that can only be satisfied if bounded communities are
able to regulate entry into their territory.
Terrestrial cosmopolitans believe that the interest in individual mobility trumps the
interest in collective autonomy, such that universal rights to individual mobility trump
collective claims to territory. Existing international norms of minority and indigenous
rights, however, fall on the “right to place” side of the debate: they highlight the import-
ance of people’s interest in maintaining a particular way of life on a particular territory.
This is especially clear in the case of indigenous rights, which emphasize the importance
of securing indigenous people’s possession and management of their traditional terri-
tories.6 But it also true of international norms of minority rights, which link particular
rights (such as bilingual street signs, or the right to use one’s language with public offi-
cials) to areas where minorities have traditionally resided,7 and which forbid state pol-
icies that seek to weaken a minority’s power in those areas (e.g. by encouraging people
from the dominant group to move into areas of traditional minority settlement).8 The
core of both indigenous and minority rights are rights to place.9
Indeed, many of the gravest historic injustices inflicted on indigenous people and
minorities have involved violating rights to place. Consider European invasion and
colonization of the Americas. It’s important to remember that these actions were often
justified by appeal to terrestrial cosmopolitanism (Kolers, 2013). The interests that
Europeans had in gaining access to indigenous peoples’ territory were granted weight by
theories of terrestrial cosmopolitanism, exacerbated by prejudice about the value of the
indigenous ways of life that were radically disrupted by European settlement. Terrestrial
cosmopolitanism does of course give weight also to the interests of the original inhab-
itants; but without recognition of an antecedent right to place, these interests are all too
easily trumped by the interests of larger or stronger groups seeking new territories for
their pleasure or profit.
Nor is this just a matter of historic wrongs. It remains a sensitive point of contestation
between migrant justice groups and indigenous justice groups. In Canada, for example,
migrant justice groups such as “No Borders,” “No One Is Illegal,” and “Shelter, Sanctuary,
Status” have sometimes advanced an open-​borders argument, based on the idea that the
world belongs to all, and that we are all commoners with rights to access to the global
commons (Sharma 2003). This is explicitly offered as an anti-​nationalist or “counter-​
national” position, challenging ideas that any nation-​state can claim sovereign rights over
territory that properly belongs to all. But in the process of challenging state sovereignty,
 Minority Rights   173

this argument also threatens the territorial claims of Canada’s indigenous peoples. If
Canada adopted open borders, much of the territory where newcomers would settle is on
unceded indigenous lands, and some indigenous advocates argue that the open-​borders
movement is therefore complicit in colonization (Lawrence and Dua 2005).
To avoid this, many cosmopolitans today disavow terrestrial cosmopolitanism in
favour of newer ideas of “rooted cosmopolitanism.” According to rooted cosmopolitan-
ism, while the interests of all people matter morally no matter where they live, we must
include amongst these interests the importance of membership in bounded communi-
ties which exercise control over themselves and their territories, and hence the necessity
for rights to place.10 Moral cosmopolitanism, in other words, does not require terres-
trial cosmopolitanism, but is consistent with—​and indeed best served by—​recognizing
place-​based rights to territory and to autonomy.11
If cosmopolitanism is understood as rooted rather than terrestrial, it may be more
compatible with emerging norms of minority and indigenous rights. Minority and indi-
genous rights can be seen as spelling out some of the place-​based rights that set lim-
its on terrestrial cosmopolitanism. But, to date at least, rooted cosmopolitans have not
offered a clear account of what these place-​based rights are, and have not explicitly asked
whether they include the sorts of rights captured in recent international instruments of
minority and indigenous rights. So, at present, the consistency of minority/​indigenous
rights with (rooted) cosmopolitanism remains uncertain.12
Let us turn now to the statist/​nationalist alternative. Insofar as statists/​nationalists
accept that rights to place limit terrestrial cosmopolitanism, they seem better equipped
to endorse international norms of minority and indigenous rights. But whether statism/​
nationalism can make sense of these norms depends on how we identify the bearers of
these place-​based rights. And here we see a lingering debate about the role of nation-
hood. For some authors, such as Walzer and Miller, nation-​states are indeed national
states, expressing and enacting a sense of shared nationhood based on a sense of shared
history, attachment to a national homeland, and a shared public culture (Miller, 1995).
For other statists, particularly in the republican tradition, states need not, and indeed
should not, appeal to pre-​political nationhood, but can instead be grounded in practices
of democratic self-​government and loyalty to a constitution, without any assumption of
shared nationhood (see Chapter 47).
I will not parse that debate here, but will only note that neither approach provides a
clear basis for endorsing place-​based rights for minorities and indigenous peoples. In
fact, both tend to render invisible the entire question. The nationalist approach tends to
simply assume the coincidence of national identity and state boundaries. Walzer fam-
ously said: “The political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of
common meanings. Language, history, and culture come together (come more closely
together than anywhere else) to produce a collective consciousness” (1983: 28). Passages
such as these render the phenomenon of minorities and indigenous peoples invisible. If
a theory of justice presupposes that citizens share a “language, history and culture,” then
the question of how to justly treat those with a different language, history, and culture
can’t arise, except as an afterthought or anomaly.
174   Will Kymlicka

Both Miller and Walzer acknowledge that some nation-​states incorporated the his-
toric homeland of other peoples, and that these minorities and indigenous peoples
sometimes resist assimilation and defend their rights to place. But their solution is to
suggest that if a common sense of nationality cannot be developed, then partition is the
best option—​i.e. the creation of two or more states that more closely match the ideal
of unified nationality. In my view, this is a counsel of despair. For many minorities and
indigenous peoples, forming a separate state is neither feasible nor desirable. Minorities
and indigenous peoples differ enormously in their size, territorial concentration, and
institutional completeness, as well in their level of interdependence with the larger state.
Telling them all in effect to either “fit in or leave” is unfair. What they need—​and what
existing international norms seek to codify—​is recognition of their place-​based rights
within the framework of existing states.
Many liberal and republican statists avoid the appeal to nationhood, and instead tie
a state’s legitimacy to standards of democracy and public justification. This seems more
hospitable to minorities and indigenous peoples, since it does not require the state to
assert that “language, history, and culture come together” in order to claim state legit-
imacy. On these proceduralist accounts, claims to legitimacy are not grounded in facts
about history and culture, but in practices of public justification. But here again, this not
only undermines nationalist defences of state sovereignty, but also undermines most
arguments for minority and indigenous rights, since they too are based on language, his-
tory, and culture. From the perspective of minorities and indigenous peoples, the prob-
lem with nationalist conceptions of the state is not that they ground place-​based rights
in appeals to language, history, and culture, but rather that they privilege the majority
nation’s language, history, and culture and render invisible the claims of minority and
indigenous peoples.13
In short, the idea that minorities and indigenous peoples have place-​based rights
that predate the state and constrain its legitimacy does not fit neatly into either cosmo-
politan or statist approaches. And so, predictably, both approaches have ignored the
international legal norms that codify these rights. If we look farther afield within IPT—​
beyond dominant liberal cosmopolitan and liberal statist approaches—​we can find
more openness to the issue amongst various radical, critical, and anarchist approaches.
But their remedy is often to abolish the existing system of territorially bounded nation-​
states entirely, and replace it with various non-​territorial models (Young 2000) or
with anarchism (Gordon 2016). It is certainly worthwhile to explore what such non-​
territorial or non-​state models of politics would look like, and whether they can provide
stable structures of democratic decision-​making.14 But these alternatives are remote
from current realities, and in the meantime, we need to ask how to secure justice for
minorities and indigenous peoples in the world order as it exists. This is the goal of exist-
ing international norms, which start from the premise that it is possible, and necessary,
for existing states to develop just relations with their minorities and indigenous peoples.
Unfortunately, the main strands of IPT seem neither equipped nor disposed to tackle
that question.15
 Minority Rights   175

Minority Rights as Matters

of International Concern?

But why should minority and indigenous rights be seen as an issue of international rela-
tions in the first place? Why isn’t this best left to the deliberation of individual coun-
tries, as a matter of domestic justice rather than international relations? There are in
fact diverse motives for international concern,16 but I would highlight one: namely, that
international law is largely responsible for creating the injustices facing minorities and
indigenous peoples, and so must take responsibility for addressing them. This is clearest
in the case of indigenous peoples. International law, far from protecting native popula-
tions against foreign rule, has historically served as a handmaiden of European imperi-
alism. International law not only historically supported the colonization of indigenous
peoples, but emerged precisely in order to facilitate European imperialism (Anghie
2004). Europeans in effect started a worldwide race war with their imperial projects, and
developed international law as a weapon in this war.
International law was, therefore, in danger of being discredited in the postwar period,
and its very legitimacy—​and the legitimacy of the international order more generally—​
depended on its ability to reform itself. In particular, it needed to show that it could
address the injustices that it itself created, not least the massively unjust distribution of
sovereignty that resulted from the way international law denied self-​determination to
indigenous peoples while awarding it to European colonizers.
This is clear in relation to the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
As Macklem notes, the Declaration can best be understood, not as responding to some
exogenous injustice out in the world, but rather as rectifying injustices that international
law itself created: “international indigenous rights mitigate some of the adverse con-
sequences of how international law validates morally suspect colonization projects
that participated in the production of the existing distribution of sovereign power”
(Macklem 2008a).17 In this sense, if the UN Declaration helps to legitimize indigenous
demands, it is equally true that the Declaration helps re-​legitimize international law
itself in a post-​colonial era (Xanthaki 2007: 6, 285).
This re-​legitimation of international law is an unfinished project, and major chal-
lenges remain. I have elsewhere discussed the difficulties in formulating international
norms of minority and indigenous rights, and in particular the problem that inter-
national norms are currently committed to an unworkable distinction between
“minorities” and “indigenous peoples.” I suspect we will ultimately need to replace this
dichotomy with a more sophisticated categorization that better tracks the diversity of
place-​based rights claimed by diverse types of groups (Kymlicka 2007; 2011). If IPT is to
contribute this task, we must move beyond current formulations of cosmopolitanism
and statism, which are largely silent on the pressing issues of ethnocultural injustice that
the international order has not only inherited, but itself helped to create.
176   Will Kymlicka

Notes
1. Critics of cosmopolitanism tend to avoid the label “communitarian”, in part because this
term has become associated with a particular set of authors (Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor),
and their perfectionist critiques of Rawls’s theory of liberal egalitarian justice. Many who
reject cosmopolitan conceptions of international justice do not endorse these communi-
tarian critiques of Rawls, and indeed may self-​identify as Rawlsian liberals (e.g. Blake 2013;
Nagel 2005). In that sense, the debate over cosmopolitanism is often a debate within liberal-
ism—​between liberal cosmopolitans and liberal statists or liberal nationalists—​rather than
a debate between liberals and communitarians. For that reason, I will use the term “statist”
or “nationalist” to denote the non-​cosmopolitan position.
2. On the unmixing of peoples in the transition from empires to nation-​states, see Brubaker
(1995).
3. It is common in the international law literature to distinguish “minorities” present at
the time of independence from “migrants” who enter a country after its independence.
Migrants are assumed to understand that they are entering a state as foreigners. Minorities,
by contrast, wake up one day to find themselves within someone else’s state due to the way
international boundaries are drawn at the time of independence. Whether this distinc-
tion between minorities and migrants is morally significant is a source of debate (Medda-​
Windischer 2009). However, since this volume includes a chapter on migration (see
Chapter 39), I will focus on minorities in the traditional sense of groups present on the terri-
tory of the state when it gains independence.
4. Some minorities were too large—​or had sufficiently powerful protectors—​for states to be
able to impose these anti-​minority strategies. In these cases, the international community
helped negotiate bilateral treaties in which a particular state would agree to respect the
rights of those minorities with powerful international friends. Several of these “minority
protection” treaties were negotiated in the inter-​war period (Jackson-​Preece 1998). But
they did little to change the anti-​minority tenor of international relations. Indeed, by con-
necting minority rights with foreign protectors, they confirmed the suspicion that minor-
ities are presumptively disloyal, with greater loyalty to some kin-​state or imperial power
than to their own country. And they offered no generalized principle of respect for minor-
ities: those minorities which lacked foreign protectors, such as the Roma, were ignored.
5. For an overview of such experiments in multiculturalism, see the “Multiculturalism Policy
Index” that I developed with Keith Banting, available at: www.queensu.ca/​mcp, and Banting
and Kymlicka (2013).
6. e.g. Article 26 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states: “Indigenous
peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally
owned, occupied or otherwise used.”
7. e.g. Article 11.2 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities
states: “In areas traditionally inhabited by substantial numbers of persons belonging to a
national minority [. . . states should] display traditional local names, street names, and other
topographical indications intended for the public also in the minority language.”
8. See Article 16 of the FCNM: “The Parties shall refrain from measures which alter the pro-
portions of the population in areas inhabited by persons belonging to national minorities
and are aimed at restricting the rights and freedoms flowing from the principles enshrined
in the present framework Convention.”
 Minority Rights   177

9. Or rather, they are the core of what is distinctive about minority and indigenous rights.
International declarations regarding minority and indigenous rights often begin by restat-
ing guarantees of civil liberties and anti-​discrimination principles found in other inter-
national law instruments, but then add novel place-​based rights. I note again that I am
relying on the traditional distinction between minorities and migrants. International
norms regarding migrants and refugees follow a different logic (see Chapter 39).
10. On rooted cosmopolitanism—​ also called “vernacular,” “embedded,” or “situated”
cosmopolitanism—​see Kymlicka and Walker (2012).
11. Animals also arguably have place-​based rights which set limits on human terrestrial
cosmopolitanism—​see Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011).
12. We might also ask how rooted cosmopolitanism differs from liberal statism/​nationalism.
Insofar as both endorse a combination of moral cosmopolitanism with place-​based rights
to territory and autonomy, the differences appear to be largely semantic.
13. We can think of republican statism as a form of levelling-​down: in response to the unfair
privileging of the majority’s language, history, and culture, it prevents anyone from mak-
ing claims based on language, history, and culture.
14. For doubts about the alternatives to territorial statehood, see Song (2012).
15. In this respect, the case of minority rights nicely illustrates Sutch’s argument that both stat-
ist and cosmopolitan IPT should learn from constructivist IR about the nature of the inter-
national norms that are actually at work.
16. For an attempt to map the motives for international involvement in state-​minority rela-
tions, see Boulden and Kymlicka (2015).
17. Macklem (2008b) discusses how this argument also justifies international norms of
minority rights.

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Banting, K., and W. Kymlicka (2013). Is There Really a Retreat from Multiculturalism Policies?
Comparative European Politics 11(5): 577–​98.
Blake, M. (2013). Justice and Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press).
Boulden, J., and W. Kymlicka (eds) (2015). International Approaches to Governing Ethnic
Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press).
Brown, C. (1992). International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York:
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Brubaker, R. (1995). Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples. Ethnic and Racial
Studies 18(2): 189–​218.
Claude, I. (1955). National Minorities: An International Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
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Donaldson, S., and W. Kymlicka (2011). Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(New York: Oxford University Press).
Gordon, U. (2016). Anarchism and Multiculturalism. In L. Cordeiro-​Rodrigues and M.
Simendic (eds), Philosophies of Multiculturalism (New York: Routledge), 63–​79.
Jackson Preece, J. (1998). National Minorities and the European Nation-​ States System
(New York: Oxford University Press).
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Kolers, A. (2013). Terrestrial Cosmopolitanism and the Right to Place. American Political
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A_​Right_​to_​Place
Kymlicka, W. (2007). Multicultural Odysseys (New York: Oxford University Press).
Kymlicka, W. (2011). Beyond the Indigenous/​Minority Dichotomy? In S. Allen and A. Xanthaki
(eds), Reflections on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Oxford: Hart,
Oxford), 183–​208.
Kymlicka, W., and K. Walker (eds) (2012). Rooted Cosmopolitanism (Vancouver: University of
British Colombia Press).
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Macklem, P. (2008a). Indigenous Recognition in International Law. Michigan Journal of
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Macklem, P. (2008b). Minority Rights in International Law. International Journal of
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Medda-​Windischer, R. (2009). Old and New Minorities: Reconciling Diversity and Cohesion
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Miller, D. (1995). On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Nagel, T. (2005). The Problem of Global Justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs 33(2): 113–​47.
Sharma, N. (2003). No Borders Movements and the Rejection of Left Nationalism. Canadian
Dimension 37(3): 37–​9.
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Song, S. (2012). The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be
Bounded by the State. International Theory 4(1): 39–​68.
Terra, L., and P. Bromley (2012). The Globalization of Multicultural Education in Social Science
Textbooks. Multicultural Perspectives 14(3): 136–​43.
United Nations Development Program (2004). Human Development Report 2004: Cultural
Liberty in Today’s Diverse World (New York: United Nations).
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(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 236–​76.
 ­c hapter 14

E nvironm enta l J u st i c e
and Su staina bi l i t y

Edward Page

There is accumulating evidence that human activities since the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution are now changing the global environment. Deforestation, species
and biodiversity loss, land degradation, air pollution, and global warming are disrupt-
ing a broad range of natural systems that are crucial determinants of health and welfare
(Griggs et al. 2013: 305; Rockström et al. 2009; Stefan et al. 2015). Such disruptions affect
the health and wellbeing of all populations, but in most cases it is the citizens of devel-
oping states that are most vulnerable due to their reliance on ecosystem services and
lack of resilience in the face of environmental change (IPCC 2014: 16–​21). International
cooperative environmental efforts—​in the form of climate change negotiations, the cre-
ation of specific sustainable development goals (SDGs), and Agenda 21 activities across
the globe—​are underpinned by the view that economic practices driving global envir-
onmental change must be reformed. However, it remains unclear how a transformation
in these practices can be achieved that will balance the interests and claims of members
of different states and generations (see Chapter 40).
Over the past three decades, a discourse of “sustainable development” has emerged as
a response to this challenge. The central idea underpinning the concept of sustainable
development, which has been in constant development since its articulation in the influ-
ential World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report of 1987,
is that human development that improves the lives of existing and future generations is
desirable and achievable only if it is compatible with the stability and integrity of envir-
onmental systems on which rich and poor populations depend (WCED 1987: 43; Curren
2011: 308).
The concept of sustainable development raises many substantive and conceptual
questions for normative theorists. Given that the causal origins of, and economic bene-
fits associated with, practices driving ecological change are so widely dispersed—​and
given that the costs of taking action to reduce the associated adverse impacts are also
widely dispersed—​ideas of sustainable development are intimately connected to wider
180   Edward Page

discourses of justice, fairness, and legitimacy. The sustainable development debate, that
is, is primarily one of values—​of what should be done to reconcile goals of human devel-
opment and environmental protection—​even if a range of natural and social science
disciplines also play a critical role in this question (Stefan et al. 2015; IPCC 2014). In
this chapter, we examine how normative political theory has attempted to clarify, and
answer, these questions and by doing so has helped shape the contested discourse of
environmental justice and sustainability.

The Concept, Meaning, and Politics

of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development has two core components: sustainability and development.

The sustainability component has been defined as the “capacity to be practiced or main-
tained indefinitely” (Attfield 2003: 127). This concise definition raises a number of
normative questions: what to sustain, for whom, how, at what cost? The development
component, by contrast, has been defined as the “satisfaction of human needs and aspir-
ations” (WCED 1987: 43). This concise definition raises a further, if connected, set of
normative questions: which needs, whose aspirations, at whose cost? Rather than being
seen as a unified concept with a settled meaning, then, sustainable development may
usefully be understood as a “discourse” that frames the debate concerning how its two
central components should be balanced. This discourse is a hotbed of contested mean-
ings and struggles over the definition and application of environmental sustainability,
sustainable development, and environmental justice, with different agents stressing dif-
ferent meanings, implications, and policies (Dryzek 2005: 142–​7; Hopwood, Mellor, and
O’Brien 2005). Sustainable development, in this way, is conceived not as a value-​neutral
description or explanation of how economic development and environmental systems
may coexist, but rather an “ethico-​political objective” that expresses “key ideas about
how society—​including the economy—​should be governed” (Jacobs 1991: 60). It is this
inherent normative element (combining an openness to a plurality of meanings) that
has fuelled the influence of sustainable development across many spheres of activity
(Dobson 1998: 60; Hopwood et al. 2005: 40).

An Anatomy of Sustainable
Development

According to the most influential conception of sustainable development, it is develop-

ment that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs” and requires “meeting the basic needs of all and
 Environmental Justice and Sustainability    181

extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life” (WCED 1989:
8, 44). Although the source of great debate and controversy, the core idea is that every
community is permitted to pursue economic development so long as it does not dam-
age the integrity of the environmental systems upon which the development of existing
and future populations rely. As such, the WCED conception of sustainable development
contains a diagnosis of current development (economic growth has pulled many mil-
lions out of poverty while its environmental impact is unsustainable) and a normative
prescription (a reformed approach to growth and development is necessary to transform
the global economy so that it remains sustainable from the environmental perspective)
(Baker 2016: 2–​7; Beckerman 1994: 193). Whilst a useful starting point, this conception
of sustainable development raises what Jordan (2008: 17) usefully calls the “riddle of sus-
tainability”: how, in theory and in practice, can economic prosperity and environmental
protection be reconciled? In order to address this riddle, it is useful to observe that com-
peting conceptions and discourses of sustainable development are characterized by how
they address a series of normative challenges (Dobson 1998: 36–​8; O’Neill 2007: 95ff.).
The key challenges can be usefully captured in the following puzzle: who should sustain
what for the sake of whom and to what end?

Scope
To recap, sustainability has been defined as the “capacity to be practiced or maintained
indefinitely” (Attfield 2003: 127), and sustainable development has been defined as
development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987: 47). These general state-
ments that development must respect the interests of members of different states and
generations are complicated by the severe difficulties in developing a coherent theory of
intergenerational and international equity so that we can answer the question “whose
sustainability guaranteed by whom?”

Metric
What should sustainable development aim to sustain? Normative theorists refer to
this as the problem of identifying the metric (or “currency”) that sustainable devel-
opment should appeal to in determining which activities and policies are sustainable
and which are unsustainable. The answers to the “sustainability of what?” question are
diverse (O’Neill 2007: 93; Attfield 2003: 133; Dobson 1998: xx). Should the metric of sus-
tainable development be welfare, resources, basic needs, capabilities, ecological space,
natural capital, or some other metric? The WCED (1987) adopts a pluralist approach
concerning what component of human wellbeing should be sustained (metrics of need,
welfare, resources, and opportunities are given particular emphasis), and more recent
attempts to specify the appropriate metric have not settled this debate (Beckerman
182   Edward Page

and Pasek 2001: 72; Barry 1999; Daly 1995: 50; Griggs et al. 2013). This metric question
matters because each metric will lead to a distinct set of human practices being viewed
as either unsustainable or sustainable, since these practices will alter the present and
distribution of each metric. Consider, as a concrete example, how to protect the nitro-
gen cycle. Industrialized agricultural practices have led to vast quantities of nitrogen
being released into the environment, causing coastal soil and water pollution that harms
the affected populations (Stefen et al. 2015). But what should be the metric by which to
evaluate measures to reverse the anthropogenic distortion of the nitrogen cycle? Is it
to maintain a certain level of welfare (across space and time) or to maintain a certain
level of income, or wealth, over time and space—​or to sustain some other metric? Next,
consider the problem of realizing sustainable development once a particular metric, or
plurality of metrics, has been selected. How can the present generation pass on to future
generations what it believes it has good reason to sustain when it clearly lacks the cap-
acity to impose a sustainable level of the preferred metric?

Pattern
Often confused with the metric puzzle is the problem, familiar to all distributive justice
theorists, of what the distributive goal of sustainable development should be. Should it
be to equalize the preferred metric, give priority to the worst off in the distribution of
the metric, guarantee a basic minimum level of welfare for all, or seek some other pat-
tern of wellbeing across and between generations? The alternative views may converge
on the judgement that present development practices are unsustainable but diverge
on why exactly these practices are unjust and how this injustice should be remedied
(Page 2006: 78–​91).
One such pattern is equality. The idea is that benefits and burdens pertaining to any
human activity should be distributed so that undeserved inequality is minimized. Since
global environmental change has the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities within
and between countries, the global egalitarian will expect the developed world (as the
home of substantial numbers of the better off) to fund generous measures to alleviate
losses and damages arising in the developing world (as the home to substantial numbers
of the worse off). This is not because of what these countries or their citizens have done
in the past, or because they are wealthy as such, but rather because this is the most effi-
cient way of achieving the desired outcome of greater equality amongst nations.
A second pattern is priority. Prioritarians reject the idea that it is always bad that some
people are undeservedly worse off than others, since they do not think that compara-
tive properties of distributive outcomes have normative relevance. Instead, they think it
regrettable that people are badly off as such: the lower a person’s wellbeing, the stronger
our duty is to benefit them. A third pattern, sufficiency, holds that benefits and burdens
should be distributed so that people have sufficient capacity to pursue the values they
care about. Attaining what we really care about, for sufficientarians, requires a certain
level of wellbeing, but once this level is reached there is no further relationship between
 Environmental Justice and Sustainability    183

how well off a person is and whether they discover and fulfil what it is that they really
care about.
The WCED, like many conceptions of sustainable development, appeals to a plural-
ity of alternative patterns—​with sufficiency, equality, and priority all being given some
weight (WCED 1989: 43–​4). However, as with the metric question, normative theorists
have shown that the selection of any particular pattern is controversial, since different
patterns will require different policies of sustainable development to be implemented
(O’Neill 2007: 97).

Weak and Strong Conceptions

of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development has often been viewed in terms of equitable maintenance of

different forms of capital (Ekins et al. 2003: 167). As a result, conceptions of sustainable
development have typically been distinguished in terms of how stringent a constraint
the maintenance of different forms of capital should be for human development. The
two most common positions discussed in the literature are strong and weak sustainable
development (Jacobs 1991; Attfield 2003: 132–​3; Baxter 1999: 197ff.; Costanza and Daly
1992: 44–​5; Reid 1995: 102–​3; O’Neill 2007: 100–​5; Ekins et al. 2003: 167–​9).1 In fact, these
conceptions appear at different positions along a continuum of positions according
to how sustainability deals with different forms of capital input from which economic
growth is possible, and each has a number of sub-​variants. They are best conceived,
therefore, as types of sustainable development rather than as tokens of a particular type
of sustainable development.

Capital
A highly contested concept within and beyond economics, “capital” has been defined
as “a stock that possesses the capacity of giving rise to flows of goods and/​or services”
(Ekins et al. 2003: 166). Building on this definition, we can say that “natural capital”
refers to stocks of natural resources that produce a flow of goods and services (Ekins
at al. 2003: 166; see also O’Neill 2007: 105). Natural capital can be distinguished from
“human” and “produced” (or “manufactured”) capital, where the former is a commu-
nity’s stock of raw labour and of social and human capital, and the latter is its stock
of machinery, equipment, buildings, and urban land (Ekins et al. 2003: 166–​7; World
Bank 2011: 4–​5). Where natural capital generates flows of benefits for humans through
important and irreplaceable functions that, if damaged, cannot be easily replaced by
substitutions of human or manufactured capital, this capital is referred to as “critical
natural capital” (O’Neill 2007: 105–​6; Chiesura and Groot 2003: 219). Natural capital
184   Edward Page

encompasses raw materials used in production processes (such as agricultural land,

oil, coal, metals, and minerals); natural processes that mediate processes of production
(such as waste absorption); “basic life-​supporting functions” (such as the ozone layer
and a stable climate system); and “amenity services” (such as wilderness areas) (Ekins
et al. 2003: 167). Each form of capital can be maintained in isolation of the other forms,
with the essential difference between the two rival accounts of sustainability being the
extent to which the loss of one form of capital can be offset by enhancements in other
forms of capital.

Weak Sustainability
According to this approach, there are no intrinsic limits to the substitution of human
and natural capital so long as the total sum of capital that remains is not diminished. The
upshot is that losses in natural capital are compatible with sustainable development so
long as they are offset by gains in human capital or technology with the same or greater
function in terms of providing a stream of benefits into the economy (O’Neill 2007: 105–​
6). Since natural and human capital are here viewed as substitutes, neither is a limit-
ing factor in human development—​or demands to be maintained intact—​considered
in isolation (Chiesura and Groot 2003: 219). Instead, the idea is to maintain the com-
bined stock of both types of capital viewed as close substitutes, thereby permitting
“some natural resources to be run down so long as adequate compensation is provided
by enhancements in other resources” (Beckerman and Pasek 2001: 75). The basis of such
compensation being “adequate” (and thus sustainable) is that increases in man-​made
capital compensate future generations “for any fall in their welfare that might have been
caused by the depletion of natural capital” (Beckerman 1994: 195). Strictly speaking,
weak sustainability does not require that the total stock of natural resources is undimin-
ishing (a feature of the stronger sense of sustainable development), but rather that the
flow of human benefits required to sustain justice and equity across and between gener-
ations is non-​diminishing (Beckerman 1994: 195–​6; see also Pearce et al. 1989: 37; Reid
1995: 102). As Baxter puts it concisely, “an economy can be considered weakly sustain-
able if it saves more than the combined depreciation of natural and man-​made capital”
(Baxter 1999: 197).
It is useful to explore an example of how a weak sustainability functions. Climate
change threatens a wide range of human interests (IPCC 2014; Rockström et al. 2009;
Stefan et al. 2015) and is one of nine major planetary boundaries—​the environmental
systems which together “define the safe operating system for humanity with respect to
the Earth system and are associated with the planet’s biophysical subsystems or pro-
cesses” that, if crossed, together or in isolation, “could generate unacceptable envir-
onmental change” (Rockström et al. 2009: 472). The human interests at risk should be
protected, according to weak sustainable development, through a combination of pre-
vention and adaptation that offsets damaged natural resource systems by exploiting
new technologies, practices, and norms that serve the same function as these resource
 Environmental Justice and Sustainability    185

systems. Because natural capital and human capital are substitutes, however, there is no
strong argument for an extremely ambitious climate change mitigation regime if losses
in human welfare from damaged natural resources can be offset either by compensat-
ing present and future generations by developing new resources that generate the same
flows of benefits or by investing in measures of adaptation or geo-​engineering that
adjust behaviour and institutions to new environmental realities while sustaining the
level of welfare prior to the disruption. The goal of achieving a “safe operating space
for humanity” (Rockström et al. 2009: 472) in the face of climate change may instead
be achieved by exploiting substitutive properties of natural and human capital rather
than attempting to prevent adverse changes in natural environmental processes through
aggressive mitigation, as recommended by “stronger” accounts of sustainability (Stefan
et al. 2015; Rockström et al. 2009: 473).
One complication with weak sustainable development is its account of resource sub-
stitution. The account of substitution at the core of weak sustainability seems problem-
atic, as it assumes a priori that all, or most, depletions of natural capital can be offset by
accompanying gains in human or manufactured capital. Not only is there little empir-
ical evidence for this strong claim in the face of the diversity of natural capital com-
ponents mentioned above (Ekins 2003: 169), but it also ignores the consideration that
some natural capital is used in the production of all flows of benefits (Costanza and
Daly 1992: 41). A useful illustrative example of this critique is stratospheric ozone deple-
tion (Rockström et al. 2009: 473). It is practically impossible to offset negative effects of
ozone layer depletion with human capital, given the limits of current technology and
the potential adverse side-​effects of such substitutions if it were possible. The ozone
layer, that is, cannot be replaced by human or manufactured capital; instead, human
behaviour can be modified so that the consequences of the depletion are reduced while
the ozone layer is repaired naturally as the human practices that damaged it are phased
out. Interestingly, planetary boundary researchers point to the case of ozone as being
one of the very few cases where a strong sustainability approach—​which advocates the
repair of damaged natural resources so that they regain their prior functioning instead
of attempts to replace this functioning with other forms of capital—​was adopted by pol-
icymakers (Stefan et al. 2015). The strong sustainability approach, in this way, reflects a
change in thinking that crossing from the Holocene into the Anthropocene triggers the
need for a stronger set of safeguards for the “Earth’s life support system” (Griggs et al.
2016: 306; see Chapter 35).
A second complication is that the very idea of weak sustainability as a normative con-
straint on the pursuit of current and future welfare through economic development
seems problematic, for it does not seem to prohibit any practices that mainstream the-
ories of environmental economics would authorize. Note here that the puzzle is not that
weak sustainability appears to permit significant continuing environmental destruction
if human needs or welfare do not suffer (Jacobs 1995: 61–​2), but rather the prior thought
that it is not a logical constraint on maximization of welfare to say that policies should
take account of environmental externalities if they are to result in maximization of wel-
fare (Beckerman 1994: 201).
186   Edward Page

Strong Sustainability
In response to concerns about weak sustainability, such as those outlined above, strong
sustainability has been developed in a number of different forms. The key idea is that the
productive activities of earlier generations should leave undiminished the total stock of
natural capital inherited by later generations, with the highest priority being given to
the preservation of critical natural capital (Daly 1995: 50; Chiesura and de Groot 2003:
220). “Undiminished,” in this context, does not mean “completely untouched” or “iden-
tical in every respect” but rather “capable of supporting a broadly equivalent range of
opportunities for well-​being.” In more concrete terms, this objective requires that each
generation (i) does not pollute the environment beyond the ability of natural systems
to absorb this pollution (the “output rule”) and (ii) only consumes renewable resources
within their rate of natural regeneration, and only depletes non-​renewable resources at
a rate equal to the creation of renewable substitutes for these resources (the “input rule”)
(Daly 1995: 50–​1).
As Daly (1995) and Jacobs (1995) observe, the key conceptual tool of strong substi-
tutability is limited substitutability. For Jacobs, sustainable development assume that
“natural and human-​made capital—​and their benefit streams—​are not infinitely sub-
stitutable [for] there are some valued functions of and services provided by the natural
environment which are not exchangeable however much human-​made capital is offered
in return” (Jacobs 1995: 63). Put simply, natural and human capital are, on this view, not
substitutes but complements, such that losses in the one type of capital cannot be fully
offset by gains in the other (Daly 1995: 51–​2; Jacobs 1995: 59–​60; see also Constanza and
Daly 1992: 41). There are two parts to this claim. First, natural and non-​natural capital
fulfil different functions and provide different sorts of benefits to their users; since they
provide different returns “in kind”—​and not merely different returns “in size”—​they
cannot be traded off against each other without some remainder. There is a very real
sense, for proponents of strong sustainability, that being better off financially is qualita-
tively separate from being better off environmentally (Jacobs 1995: 59–​60). Second, nat-
ural resources are a “non-​eliminable” component in all instances of production, so it is
simply not the case that natural and non-​natural capital are infinitely substitutable, as
proposed by the weak sustainability approach (Daly 1995: 51).2 The claim that natural
and non-​natural capital are complements and not substitutes, however, does not mean
that human-​made capital cannot sometimes offset (or compensate for) losses in natural
capital, for to deny this would be to endorse an “absurdly strong sustainability” (Daly
1995: 49) that endorses “a requirement to preserve intact the environment as we find it
today in all its forms” (Beckerman 1994: 194). Instead, natural capital may sometimes be
depleted, but this has strict limits, since some natural capital is critical to the health of
the biosphere and cannot be offset by a greater amount of human capital. Nevertheless,
strong sustainable development is, broadly speaking, an enlightened anthropocentric
view, since it sees the value of sustainability through the lens of human wellbeing rather
than the wellbeing of natural objects, non-​human animals, or the biosphere.
 Environmental Justice and Sustainability    187

Again, an example of how the strong sustainable approach works is useful. One of the
planetary boundaries highlighted by Rockström et al. (2009: 473) as existing in a state of
serious overshoot is biodiversity loss. According to the strong-​sustainability approach,
such losses cannot be offset by gains in human capital, since the pervasive effects on
human and natural systems of loss of genetic diversity cannot be offset by gains in
human capital given existing human knowledge—​with the result that a substitution
approach could not replicate the critical role of biodiversity in preventing natural and
human systems tipping over into irreversibly damaged states. Such systems must, there-
fore, be protected by targeting the causes of these losses (e.g. over-​reliance on fossil fuels
and industrialized agriculture practices) rather than through adaptations in practices or
institutions (through resource substitutions such as crop-​switching or dietary changes)
that appear to play a similar functional role in sustaining human welfare (Rockström
et al. 2009: 474).
Strong sustainability raises a number of puzzles. The approach recommends the
preservation of irreplaceable components of nature, but does not give a full account
of to whom this duty is owed or what should be done when different groups benefit
from, and value, different features of natural capital in different ways (Chiesura and
de Groot 2003: 220). Consider the seventh and eighth “planetary boundaries”: fresh
water and land use (Rockström 2009: 473). How should conflicts between users of
these different natural resource systems be resolved if only some of these systems can
be preserved? More generally, the strong-​sustainability approach raises the question
of what the acceptable limits of natural capital depletion are, given that tensions arise
between development and sustainability that are absent in weak sustainability and
traditional development accounts, which evaluate sustainability and development
according to a common standard of welfare maximization. An optimal strategy for
a community, just as within an individual life (so the arguments goes) would be to
rule out some development opportunities as sub-​optimal due to their adverse envir-
onmental impacts; but there is little reason to prefer environmental protection over
optimization when they conflict (Beckerman 1994: 193–​5).3 Finally, the approach, in
common with weak sustainability, appears to endorse an economic-​monetary con-
cept at its core (“capital”), whereas many argue that the value of sustainability cannot
be fully captured in monetary terms, so this focus on capital is incoherent (Dobson
1998; O’Neill 2007).

Questioning Sustainable Development

As we have seen, there is a broad range of conceptions of sustainable development, and

as a result objections can be made to each conception. Nonetheless, it is possible to clas-
sify objections to the underlying concept; and a useful categorization distinguishes
objections according to whether what is at stake is normative desirability, conceptual
188   Edward Page

coherence, or practical application. Here I sketch three areas of critique commonly

directed towards the sustainable development concept rather than to distinctive
interpretations of it.

Unjustified Anthropocentrism
The WCED assumes that “[human] wellbeing is the ultimate goal of all environment and
development policies” (WCED 1987: xiv). This anthropocentric assumption is common
to almost all conceptions of sustainable development, whether weak or strong, which
are often pluralist in content but highly restrictive in terms of scope. This “anthropocen-
tric” starting point has been widely criticized by normative environmental theorists for
endorsing an unjustified “species chauvinism” (Routley and Routley 1995: 104). Theories
of environmental ethics such as zoocentrism (Singer 1993: 21ff.), “ecologism” (Baxter
1999: 197), biocentrism (Taylor 1986: 124), and ecocentrism (Callicott 2001) all converge
in rejecting the philosophical basis of this assumption. Consider Ekins et al.’s (2003)
highly cited account of strong sustainability. The authors argue that “from a human
point of view, what matters about the environment is not particular stocks of natural
capital per se, but the ability of the capital stock as a whole to be able to continue to per-
form the environmental functions which make an important contribution to human
welfare” (pp. 172–​3). The question is: why make this assumption when anthropocentric
assumptions about economic growth appear to have resulted in the crisis that sustain-
able development seeks to solve (Hayward 1998: 4)?

Too Economic
The anthropocentric critique is related to a further challenge that sustainable develop-
ment, weak and strong, incorporates an overly “economic” approach to global environ-
mental change. In valuing natural capital only in instrumental human terms, sustainable
development appears to reduce the ethical importance of such capital to the bene-
fit streams their use, and conservation, provide for humans. In this sense, it has been
argued that both strong and weak sustainable development fail to capture the true value
of the natural environment (Dobson 1998: 40–​1), and this in turn leads to an excessive
optimism concerning the compatibility of economic development and environmental
sustainability. As O’Neill puts it: “we do not live in capital or stocks or bundles of assets.
We live in places that are significant in a variety of ways for different communities and
individuals. And the natural world in which humans have entered and will one day leave
is that, a natural world with its own history: it is not ‘capital’ ” (O’Neill 2007: 108). In
response, it might be claimed that “natural capital” is—​at least for strong sustainable
development—​merely a useful metaphor that captures the importance of the life sup-
porting functions of nature which are “critical for the well-​being of and the sustainabil-
ity of human society” (Chiesura and de Groot 2003: 221). That is, natural capital can be
 Environmental Justice and Sustainability    189

seen as a concept whose scope extends beyond the realm of monetary evaluation. It is
unclear how to evaluate these rival perspectives.

Loss and Damage

While all conceptions of sustainable development, as we saw above, are at bottom
grounded on an analysis of environmental disruption dating back to the Industrial
Revolution, the concept itself is inescapably “forward-​looking.” The idea (to put it in
terms of modern thinking about global environmental change) is that planetary bound-
aries have been surpassed, and the unsustainable development that threatens further
overshoots of these boundaries must be curbed. But recent research in the arena of cli-
mate change and other environmental boundaries has shown that significant loss and
damage have already occurred as a result of environmental change, and much more is
expected and may not be preventable even if a swift transformation towards sustainable
development is achieved. The concept of sustainable development has little to say about
remedying or correcting the injustices connected to such losses and damages.

Insensitivity to Justice in Recognition

In prioritizing a distributive approach to environmental sustainability, sustainable
development has been criticized for lacking a strong theory of democracy and partici-
pation (Schlosberg 2006: 104ff.) while also overstating the value of development as crit-
ical for human wellbeing. Sustainable development, that is, as an extension of “green
capitalism,” legitimizes institutions and market practices in responding to global envir-
onmental degradation—​rather than offering a critique of capitalism and the inequality
it generates (Barry 1999; see Chapter 49)—​and is insensitive to cultural differences in
the way human development is conceived (Connelly and Smith 1999: 58–​9). Consider
the metric problem discussed earlier. The idea of sustainable development is essentially
distributive, but at least some components of wellbeing cannot be easily reduced to a
single metric that can be distributed across populations. Equality of recognition, toler-
ance, respect, and dignity are examples (O’Neill 2007: 95). The debate concerning the
appropriate metric of sustainable development, according to this line of thought, also
downplays socio-​cultural perspectives on sustainable development, which emphasizes
nature’s “immaterial and intangible services such as mental health, recreation, or heri-
tage values, but also the cognitive and emotional aspects of people’s relationship with
nature” (Chiesura and de Groot 2003: 228). These are not things, external objects, or
resources which can be distributed from one person, community, or generation to
another in order to sustain the preferred metric, or should be if they could; neither can
their value to people be reduced to welfare, wellbeing, quality of life, all things con-
sidered. As O’Neill puts it, “Equality is concerned with the nature of the social rela-
tionships between individuals. It is concerned with issues of power, of relationships
190   Edward Page

of super-​ordination and subordination, and with issues of recognition, of who has

standing in a community and what activities and attributes are acknowledged as hav-
ing worth” (2007: 95). What if sustaining these non-​distributive values requires a devi-
ation from the sustaining of our preferred distributive metric in the face of the global,
regional, and local effects of environmental degradation such as climate change? Which
should be prioritized if and when they conflict?

Conclusion

In this chapter I have explored the conceptual development of environmental sustain-

ability, in particular the influential conception of sustainable development developed by
the WCED, and tried to show how normative theory can enrich the discussion of sus-
tainable development. Rather than defend a particular approach to sustainability, I set
out to show how normative theory can make sense of the contestable terrain of envir-
onmental sustainability while outlining some of the key normative issues at stake and
how they might be solved. Environmental sustainability and sustainable development
are complex, contested concepts, and each has generated a set of complex, contested
debates. This inherent complexity does not mean that these concepts and discourses
are not meaningful or do not have policy relevance. The concept of sustainable devel-
opment, in particular, has inspired a range of fascinating debates in normative theory
concerning the appropriate scope, site, metric, and pattern of justice; and sustainable
development has been pursued in concrete activities and policies, from Agenda 21 activ-
ities at the local level to the formulation of global sustainable development goals.

Notes
1. These are also sometimes referred to as “narrow” and “broad” sustainable development
(Pearce et al. 1989: 37; Reid 1995: 102).
2. A claim that is hotly contested by those who argue that the distinction is illusory, and that
acting as if it were meaningful would result in existing global poverty reduction measures
being undermined (see Beckerman 1994: 193–​5).
3. The veracity of this objection is highly contested in the literature, given that many strong
sustainability advocates hold that it rests on an implausible interpretation of their view as
prohibiting any depletion of any resource, when the requirement is merely that the loss of
some natural components cannot be compensated for by the provision of human-​created
substitutes.

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 Pa rt I V

I N T E R NAT IONA L
P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY
OF V IOL E N C E A N D
C ON F L IC T
 ­c hapter 15

Violenc e a nd
Internati ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Anthony F. Lang, Jr

Consider three instances of violence: First, on 1 February 2002, Daniel Pearl, a jour-
nalist with the Wall Street Journal was beheaded by Islamic extremists in Pakistan. Since
his death, others have been decapitated by Islamic extremists, the videos of which are
then released and available on social media. Second, on 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was
executed on the guillotine in Paris. This moment of violence established a new consti-
tutional and democratic order in France. Executions had up to this point been a means
by which “sovereignty is restored” (Foucault 1977 [1975]: 48) or a way for the sovereign
to inscribe its power on the populace. In this case, the execution created a new form
of sovereignty, one based on the people rather than the divine rights of kings. Third,
in the mid-​nineteenth century, collecting and examining shrunken heads became a
part of Victorian-​era science. Though the practice of headhunting was condemned by
European colonial authorities, it also demonstrated to the civilized world the barbar-
ity of the peoples who needed to be governed, especially as these heads ended up in
museums and personal collections throughout Britain. As a recent study points out,
“While headhunting defined ‘primitive’ man’s base condition, collecting other people’s
heads bolstered ‘civilized’ man’s cultural ascendency” (Larson 2014: 39). The violence
bound up with colonialism merged with a set of “civilized” practices that played a cru-
cial role in shaping the modern conception of science and the museum.
These three instances of violence are political. The first two are more obviously so,
i.e. efforts to publicly demonstrate power and simultaneously create new authority
structures. The third is not a single overt act (though the original act of creating the
shrunken head by the tribe had a political purpose—​to take the spiritual power of the
enemy defeated in battle). Cutting off heads is not the only form of violence: humans
have developed too many forms to address in a single chapter. A focus on the head, how-
ever, connects violence to the political because of the metaphorical link between heads
196   Anthony F. Lang, Jr

and political leadership and the scientific link between reason and the brain.1 It is no
accident, in other words, that violence to the head is highly politicized.
This chapter will explore violence through the lens of International Political Theory
(IPT). In so doing, the three seemingly disparate forms of violence noted above can
be interpreted through a single lens that directs our attention to political concepts
such as authority, rights, and rules (Lang 2014: 3). Moreover, this chapter will address
the ways in which international and global practices of violence raise new questions
because authority, rights, responsibilities, and rules are not so clearly fixed at levels
beyond the nation-​state. The argument of the chapter is, very broadly, that violence
constrains and enables politics at the same time that politics constrains and enables
violence. IPT can provide a critical and historical perspective on the intersection
of violence and the political while also providing some normative valuation of this
intersection.
More specifically, I highlight one dimension of IPT as it relates to violence more than
others: the question of authority. This runs counter to certain strands in philosophical
thought about the use of force, which tend to privilege the idea of just cause (Fabre 2012;
McMahan 2009). A focus on authority helps to explain and evaluate uses of force in the
modern international order, for authority is that which defines community, that which
authorizes war, and that which creates the rules that govern force. A focus on authority
is also not limited to the sovereign state, but instead allows us to explore a range of dif-
ferent structures and institutions, from religious to social to legal. In a sense, authority
provides a key through which to politicize our reflections on war and violence (Lang,
O’Driscoll, and Williams 2013). And, as noted above, metaphors for political authority
are most often located in the head, making the removal of heads a political act in large
part because it is a challenge to existing forms of authority—​a point I will return to in the
conclusion.2

Violence and Authority

Authority does not sit well within modern liberal and democratic thought. As Hannah
Arendt explained, its meaning is rooted in history and religion, which renders it difficult
for those within liberal and democratic political systems to accept (Arendt 1963). At a
deeper level, standards arising from history, religion, or other traditional forms of gov-
ernance stand in opposition to the ideal of rational deliberation which is at the heart of
modern democratic theory (see Chapter 33): “To be subjected to authority, it is argued,
is incompatible with reason, for reason requires that one should always act on the bal-
ance of reasons of which one is aware. It is of the nature of authority that it requires sub-
mission even when one thinks that what is required is against reason” (Raz 1979: 3).
Yet authority, while problematic for liberal democracies, is central to practices of vio-
lence. Four political theorists of violence bring out the centrality of authority, though
they approach it in different ways. That is, these are not theorists who defend authorities
 Violence and IPT   197

using violence; rather, reading their work through the lens of the problem of authority
illuminates the diverse ways in which violence and authority intersect to create our glo-
bal political life.
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth served as a clarion call to many revolution-
ary movements upon its publication in 1961 (Fanon 2001 [1961]). His analysis of vio-
lence in the context of colonialism explored how violence can free the individual from
the domination of the powerful. This domination is partly the result of political struc-
tures of authority, but this formal political authority relies upon forms of knowledge and
power that give authority to the colonizer over the colonized. As a result, the political act
of violence is not just about overthrowing formal authority; rather, it creates new ways of
knowing, giving back to the colonized a deeper kind of authority, over how they under-
stand themselves in relation to their world.

Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated
by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives
the key to them. (Fanon 2001 [1961]: 118)

Violence, then, provides a bridge between two forms of authority; being “in author-
ity” or being “an authority”; the former is authority that comes from a political proced-
ure, while the latter is a form of authority that comes from knowledge or experience
(Flathman 1980). Fanon articulates a justification for violence that creates not only new
politics but new ways of knowing, a deeper emancipation than a simple revolution could
provide.
Opposed to Fanon’s valorization of violence is Arendt’s On Violence, in which she
argues that violence will not contribute to political knowledge or authority but will only
enable the continuing use of more violence. Arendt’s overriding concern in this essay
was to decouple the concepts of violence and power that had become linked in various
Third World and Marxist discourses (Owens 2008). She argues that, while war has long
been part of the human condition, the advent of nuclear weapons has created a world in
which any link between power and violence has been severed: “The technical develop-
ment of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal
could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in
armed conflict” (Arendt 1972: 105). She compares this technological power of the state
with the student movements that had taken up violence in their revolutionary efforts.
She suggests that to better understand violence, we need a better understanding of
power, which she supplies:

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power
is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence
only so long as the group keeps together. (Arendt 1972: 143)

As opposed to this understanding of power, violence is the utilization of implements to

coerce others.
198   Anthony F. Lang, Jr

This distinction speaks to the question of authority. For Arendt, power is the foun-
dation of government, but it does not give legitimacy. Violence, on the other hand,
can never be legitimate, it can only be justified (Arendt 1972: 151). Arendt argues that
to engage in violence is not irrational or even inhuman; she points out that at times
violence is the only way to set things right, to achieve justice. But violence is always
just a means, and a short-​term means for Arendt. It is the most dangerous of means,
for political action is about the action itself, not about its consequences, according
to Arendt’s conception of political action. While she argued in her essay on author-
ity that it has disappeared from the modern world, her conception of power and
politics described in this essay on violence provides a corrective (Arendt 1963). If
power is defined as the ability to act together to create new beginnings and realities,
it provides an alternative to violence, even that espoused in Fanon’s account. Power
creates authoritative institutions and frameworks in ways that violence can never
accomplish.
While Fanon and Arendt address the links between violence, politics, and authority,
other theorists link violence to law. Walter Benjamin was a cultural and literary theorist
rather than someone who thought of himself as a political theorist, but in a short essay
published in 1920 he offers an important perspective on the nature of violence, which
he sees as intimately connected to law and political institutions by “expounding its [vio-
lence’s] relation to law and justice” (Benjamin 1978 [1920]: 277). He goes on to argue
that both natural and positivist law seek to interpret and contain violence. Natural law
accomplishes this task by claiming that violence, particularly self-​defence, is something
that is natural and so can be justified if put into accordance with reason. Positivist law, he
argues, justifies violence in the name of law by means of its consequentialist character,
i.e. that it seeks to advance a just end (see Chapter 5).
Benjamin suggests that violence has a law-​making character built into it, meaning
that the law is a form of coercive action on persons not just in pursuit of specific ends,
such as winning a war or controlling a strike, but in safeguarding the very nature of pol-
itical life. That is, law must of necessity be violent, for in so doing it controls political
life. In reflecting on the existence of capital punishment, he notes that “law reaffirms
itself ” (Benjamin 1978 [1920]: 287). But it is not just in the act of execution that violence
constitutes the law; indeed, this can be found in Arendt. Benjamin argues that even the
existence of the police is a form of violence, for its constant background conditions of
coercion inflict violence, often on the poor or marginalized in society.
Benjamin does not stop at just the legal and political nature of violence. He suggests
that violence is to be found in the very nature of literary acts such as myth-​making (and,
by implication, religion-​making). Myths instantiate violence and link it to the powerful,
to those who govern in an ultimate sense: “Lawmaking is power making, and, to that
extent, an immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine end
making, power the principle of all mythical lawmaking” (Benjamin 1978 [1920]: 295).
He argues that this religious act of power through violence is translated into law in the
state, resulting in an intimate relationship between law, politics, and violence. In a sense,
then, like Fanon, Benjamin turns from the formal dimension of law’s authority to its
 Violence and IPT   199

underlying theoretical dimension; the authority of law lies in the authority of its myth-​
making potential, its ability to create new worlds through narrative.
Moving from the critical theory of Benjamin to the post-​structural theory of
Michel Foucault reinforces the “structural” account of violence.3 The very name “post-​
structural” points us to the way Foucault does not rest his analysis upon identifiable
institutions or laws. Instead, throughout his work, Foucault was interested in identifying
the ways in which discourses and socio-​political practices rely on violence and reinforce
the centrality of violence to political life. For instance, in his account of genealogy, he
suggests what can be found when one pays attention to these underlying discourses and
practices:

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at uni-
versal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs
each of its violences in a system of rule and thus proceeds from domination to dom-
ination. (Foucault 1977 [1971]: 151)

In his 1975–​6 lectures at the Collège de France, which have been published under the
title Society Must Be Defended, he extends this to suggesting how all of political life is, in
some way, fundamentally structured by practices that parallel war, explicitly invoking
the work of the Prussian theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz (Foucault 2004 [1997]).
Political life is both strategic and violent in important ways. In these lectures and else-
where Foucault develops the idea of biopolitics, which he defines as the set of prac-
tices designed to control life, by taking and creating it. Unlike direct forms of violence
undertaken by formal authorities, these practices are more nuanced and seem perfectly
benign. They include such things as regulating public health and efforts to map and
control demographic changes. In this way, Foucault reveals how law and social norms
rest upon a deeper set of ongoing conflicts, even violent conflicts, asking if beneath the
“peace, order, wealth and authority, beneath the calm order of subordinations, beneath
the State and State apparatus, beneath the laws, and so on, will [we] hear and discover a
sort of primitive and permanent war?” (Foucault 2004 [1997]: 46–​7).
Foucault’s account speaks directly to the multiple forms of authority identified in this
section. At one level, he is concerned with formal structures of authority and suggests
ways to resist them. At the deeper level which we find in all four of these theorists, his
understanding of authority looks to the theoretical foundations upon which authority
claims are made. This takes us back to Arendt’s essay concerning authority (1963), in
which she posits that authority today cannot be so easily translated into something like
a social contract, but requires some discursive context in order to function. Foucault’s
work highlights the pervasiveness of that context and also links it directly to violence.
Violence, according to Fanon and Benjamin, is political. Fanon suggests how violence
can be seen as a way to achieve and advance political agency. Arendt’s account chal-
lenges this in some important ways, though she also relates violence to politics, even as
she seeks to keep violence distinct from her ideal form of political life—​that of deliber-
ation in the public sphere. Benjamin’s account helps us to see how legal, philosophical,
200   Anthony F. Lang, Jr

and religious means for limiting violence may well be violent in and of themselves. And
Foucault points to deeper forms of violence. Not one of these four theorists addresses
the international dimension of violence directly, though in all four cases their concerns
and insights speak across the domestic and international boundary. What they demon-
strate is that the domestic realm, which one would assume is a space where violence is
limited and constrained, is just as violent as the international realm.
Having set out these perspectives, let me now turn to some of the ways in which struc-
tures of authority and systems of rules have sought to control and constrain violence.
They have, in a sense, been designed to keep violence out of the political realm. But, as
we shall see, violence and the political cannot be so easily kept distinct, particularly if
our understanding of the political is kept open ended.

Regulating and Governing Violence

Over time, there have been numerous efforts to regulate and govern violence. As we
look more carefully at these efforts, however, it soon becomes clear that regulating vio-
lence may well generate new forms of violence. Such efforts should not be denigrated
for this reason; rather, it is important to emphasize that political life means that efforts
to control violence often lead to new forms of violence. A focus on authority highlights
how these dynamics operate. In this section, I look to three different efforts to regulate
and govern violence: religion, society, and law.

Religion and Violence

Religious traditions have enabled and constrained violence through institutions of
authority (both divine and otherwise) and rule systems generated by those authority
structures. Importantly, those practices of restraint and enablement result in large part
from the diversity of authority structures that shape the context in which religious prac-
tices operate. To highlight those authority structures means moving away from a sim-
ple rule-​based approach to religious texts in understanding the political nature of these
practices.
Within the Judeo-​Christian tradition, there are rules and rule-​like statements about
violence and war (Exod. 20:14; Num. 21:1–​54). But extracting rules from the biblical
texts fails to appreciate how they events they describe and the interpretations of those
events arose in contexts shaped by competing authority structures. For instance, dur-
ing a period when the Israelites were trying to establish their dominance in the region
of Canaan, described in the Book of Judges, killing through deception and trickery
became more common because, without established authorities and rule-​makers, any
form of violence was justified in advancing what was thought to be a just cause. The
authors of this book were aware of how authority shaped such practices, for the book
 Violence and IPT   201

famously ends with the lamentation: “In those days, there was no king; all the people did
what was right in their own eyes” (Judg. 21:25).
The arrival of Jesus of Nazareth produced a new tradition, that of Christianity. The
stories of Jesus, found in the Gospels, describe an individual who refused the dominant
religious and political modes authority, including the use of violence. One reading of
Jesus that brings out his pacifism can be found in The Politics of Jesus by John Howard
Yoder, who argued that Jesus’ choice not to associate himself with the zealots who sur-
rounded him demonstrates his pacifist credentials (Yoder 1994). This pacifism then per-
sists into the early Christian Church due largely to that community’s attempts to hide
itself from persecution (Bainton 1961).
But when the Roman emperor Constantine adopted Christianity after a mystical
experience in the mid-​fourth century, Christianity moved away from its pacifist origins.
The shift away from pacifism was best articulated by Augustine of Hippo (ad 354–​430),
who served as a bishop in north Africa. His attitude toward war is that it is necessary
for the creation of an acceptable order on earth; but this earthly order can never match
the heavenly order, which is where the only true justice is to be found. Even more
importantly, he sees war as an evil that must never be embraced but should be under-
taken reluctantly, so that mercy and justice discipline war. He argues that the authority
of a heavenly kingdom is not possible on earth, so violence can be used to move the
world toward a more just system. Augustine remains a touchstone for those seeking to
understand the Judeo-​Christian heritage as it relates to violence and war. For instance,
Jean Bethke Elshtain at first interpreted Augustine as a theorist of limits who can help
to moderate war’s excesses by bringing forth the lessons of the early Church (Elshtain
1995). Some years later, however, Elshtain drew on Augustine in arguing that the de facto
authority of the great powers gives them justification to use war to punish terrorists
(Elshtain 2003).
An alternative but connected religious tradition (as both have their roots in the Jewish
tradition) is that of Islam (Kelsay 1993; 2009). To understand the Islamic approach to
war and peace, a focus on authority is once more helpful. First, unlike Christianity, the
founder of Islam was the leader of a political community. When Mohammed immi-
grated to Medina at the invitation of the elites of that city in ad 622, he inaugurated
the beginnings of a formal political community which rapidly expanded (Watt 1961: 82–​
101). This expansion does not necessarily make Islam more violent than Christianity, but
it means that understanding the ways in which Islamic theorists construct their political
ideas concerning violence are intimately connected to the fact that they are basing that
construction on someone who had a formal authority role.
The second important feature of Islam is the centrality of law. Most debates about
specific norms, rules, and laws in Islam are based upon the interpretation of legal texts
(see Schacht 1979; al-​Azami 1996). The teachings of the Qur’an and the example of
Muhammad’s life as found in the hadith have led to the creation of sharia, the body of
Islamic law that governs the life of the individual Muslim and the Islamic ummah. This
legalism also needs to be understood through authority structures, which can be found
in Mohammed Shaybani’s Sharia Kitab As-​Siyar, one of the first texts on international
202   Anthony F. Lang, Jr

law in the Islamic tradition (Khadduri 1961; see also Khadduri 1955). This eighth-​century
text explores not only questions of war and peace but how the Islamic empire should
relate to other communities through diplomacy. For Shaybani, the use of military force
was allowed, but it was to be moderated by concerns about innocents and by injunctions
not to force conversions of individuals to Islam.
Contemporary efforts to apply the Islamic ethics of war also result from particular
configurations of authority. When Osama bin Laden presented his interpretation of
the tradition in a fatwa that justifies violent actions, he challenged legal and scholarly
authority structures. Traditionally, only the ulema, or scholars of the law, could under-
take such authoritative interpretations, ones that took place within the confines of the
four traditional schools of Islamic law. While interpretations such as these have received
the most interest of late, the power to interpret these sacred texts has been altered in
recent years by the emergence of new communities of young Muslims and the increased
salience of social media (Mandaville 2007).
Without the formal authority of the caliphate, similar to the example of the Hebrew
Book of Judges, modes of violence do not conform to rules that protect civilians, but
rather generate acts of violence that find their justification in the cause alone. Yet, in
the case of Christianity, the figure who challenged established authority—​Jesus—​was
perhaps more of a pacifist than those figures—​such as Augustine—​who saw a closer
connection between order and violence. A focus on authority does not provide a single
conclusion, but it does reveal the different ways in which violence connects to political
dynamics.

Society and Violence

It is mistaken to claim that “society” has clearly defined views on violence, or that soci-
etal norms shape and structure theories of violence. Rather, social norms arise in ways
that cannot be identified with any one individual theorist or even a clearly defined trad-
ition. Instead, over time, norms concerning violence have emerged that result from
socioeconomic contexts which, as a result of international and global political configur-
ations, become more and more influential. Yet even in contexts such as these that lack a
clearly defined authority structure, the lens of authority can help us to understand how
such norms function.
Steven Pinker, a neurobiologist, argues that over the history of human existence, vio-
lence has declined. In The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker 2011), he presents a wealth
of data in support of his hypothesis. Some of this data has been disputed, and one can
respond to his case with examples of war, terrorism, and conflict that might seem to
counter his hypothesis. But Pinker’s account is not simply one of science; it is a polit-
ical argument, one that relies heavily on Enlightenment liberalism. For instance, in one
chapter entitled “The Rights Revolutions” Pinker argues that violence based on race,
gender, sexual orientation, age (i.e. against children), and species (i.e. against animals)
have all decreased over time. He concludes the chapter by suggesting that the idea of
 Violence and IPT   203

rights within these different categories is a key contributing factor to the lessening of
violence.
A second sociological argument that has become prominent across a number of dif-
ferent disciplines comes from the work of Norbert Elias. A German sociologist, Elias
wrote a two-​volume work on what he called the “civilizing process” (Elias 1994 [1939]).
He focused on manners and personal behaviour in various European contexts as evi-
dence of how people have become more “civilized.” This process, he suggests, is not just
one of manners, however, but has a great influence across society. Robert Muchembled, a
French social historian, draws on Elias to demonstrate how and why violence in Europe
has declined since the medieval period (Muchembled 2012 [2008]). According to
Muchembled, personal violence had historically been the preserve of adolescent males.
He combines Elias with insights from Foucault, identifying how both of their frame-
works of analysis reveal important developments in the lessening of violence. Across his
examples, it is not religion or law that lead to the decrease in violence, but social prac-
tices and assumptions such as local fairs and literature, not even clearly articulated at
times, which lead to the creation of a more peaceful social order across Europe.
Some in the study of International Relations have drawn on these sociological
accounts of how violence is regulated. Andrew Linklater’s recent work on harm conven-
tions is directly indebted to Elias (Linklater 2011). Linklater points to the various ways in
which harm—​a term which overlaps with but is not parallel with “violence”—​has been
contained within structures of global governance. Adham Saouli has extended Elias’s
ideas into the Middle East context, where he finds two instances of a lessening of vio-
lence. First, he suggests that Hezbollah, a Lebanese group that is usually seen as a ter-
rorist organization, can be seen as lessening its inclinations to use violence as it engaged
more directly in the Lebanese political process (Saouli 2011). Second, he points to how
the eruption of protests in Egypt as part of the Arab Spring uprisings, particularly the
formation of an activist community in Tahrir Square in the centre of Cairo, exhibited
strong civilizing tendencies. In a protest movement that could have easily become vio-
lent, and whose activists were subject to a great deal of violence by the Egyptian author-
ities, there developed instead a rather orderly community in the square, one in which
individuals sought to keep the space cleared of rubbish, to provide food, and to organize
themselves peacefully (Saouli 2015).
These examples of decreases in violence as a result of a socialization process can also
be found in certain strands of constructivist IR theory. Constructivism as a theoretical
tradition arises from a sociological framework, one that seeks to locate the power of
“norms” as ideational factors within international politics. One recent norm that has
become prominent in discussions of human rights and humanitarian intervention is the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) (see Chapter 25). This topic is dealt with elsewhere in
this volume, but it is interesting to note that most of the advocates of this principle—​that
when states fail to care for their populations or actively harm them, the international
community has a responsibility to protect—​argue that it is a social norm that has
become more and more effective over time. Alex Bellamy has argued that the normative
structures that R2P generates throughout international organizations are evidence of its
204   Anthony F. Lang, Jr

influence (Bellamy 2015). Kurt Mills has supplemented this account by proposing three
modes of responsibility that are operative in the international order: responsibility to
prosecute, responsibility to palliate, and responsibility to protect (Mills 2015).
To accept that R2P is a social norm that has influenced a wide range of institutions
and actors in the international order, however, ignores the politics that underlie its invo-
cation. Anne Orford, for instance, has argued that R2P may well appear in an innocuous
and normatively positive way, but at the same time it forces us to consider the authority
structures that underlie it. Indeed, for Orford, R2P undermines the traditional author-
ity of international law and gives more power to the UN Security Council (Orford 2011).
Aidan Hehir has argued that R2P means nothing until it becomes legalized, i.e. until its
influence is beyond just a set of social norms but more binding rules (Hehir 2012).

Law and Violence

Law is essentially a body of rules which have a different status from other rules either
because they can be formally enforced (Austin 1995 [1832]) or because they arise from
a more formalized political process (Hart 1994). But no matter how they differ, laws are
ultimately a form of rules. This point is important to emphasize at the international level,
especially as international law is sometimes questioned as “real law,” largely because it
lacks a formal enforcement mechanism and because it does not arise from a representa-
tive political structure such as a parliament.
There exist a wide range of rules governing the international order. One could argue
that there are, in fact, two types of rules: formal (or legal) and informal (Lang, Rengger,
and Walker 2005). Informal rules derive from traditions of statecraft, such as the prin-
ciple that allies should work together and not betray each other in order to balance
against an adversary. Formal rules derive from nineteenth-​century positivist inter-
national law, and in the current international security order have coalesced around the
UN Charter. Both types of rules play an important role in the international order by pro-
viding guidelines and patterned behaviour (Arendt 2000).
Rules, however, can not only create security; they can also close off certain types
of political engagement. Rules occlude the role of power, conflict, and violence in the
practices of politics, giving a positive sheen to activities that are, in fact, quite con-
tested. Many have argued that in the current international order the sole authority for
declaring war should be the UN Security Council. But turning to the Security Council
actually reinforces the powerful, as it does not challenge the veto power of the five per-
manent members. By giving these five states more power in the institution, the UN
system was designed to avoid the weakness and indecision that plagued the League of
Nations. Importantly the UN was constructed from the ashes of the Second World War,
as a means to decisively end war in the future; indeed, Article 1 of the Charter states
clearly that the purpose of the UN is to secure international peace and security. One
can read the creation of the United Nations, especially the Security Council, as simply
a continuation of World War II, a continued violence inflicted upon politics. A peace
 Violence and IPT   205

settlement is not really the end of war, for war continues in the construction of rules and
modes of political order. The framers of the UN Charter hoped to create what appeared
to be a rule-​governed order by giving these states the ability to control the international
security order.
Not only is the existence of rules and laws an instance of power, but their interpret-
ation reveals modes of violence as well, as described by Robert Cover: “Legal interpret-
ive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates
her legal understanding of a text, and, as a result, someone loses his freedom, his prop-
erty, his children, even his life” (Cover 1986: 1601). Jacques Derrida furthers this point,
suggesting that any rule or law has within it violence, the violence of enforcement. That
violence is revealed in moments of interpretation, when those who must articulate the
meaning of the rule enforce it upon others (Derrida 1992). For instance, consider how
international legal decisions and practices rely on a type of interpretation that reinforces
violent practices. In the lead up the 2003 Iraq War, interpretations of Resolution 1441
and of the two UNMOVIC reports by the US reveal a type of violence, a punitive vio-
lence. The US insisted that if it did not punish Iraq for its violations of the resolutions
concerning its WMD programmes, the authority of the UN would be undermined.
Their punitive arguments were extended to upholding human rights norms, those that
had been violated by the regime of Saddam Hussein during his rule. Connecting Iraq
to 9/​11 added a further reason to punish. Note that all these punitive dimensions to the
war depend on a particular type of interpretation of international law, a body of law that
traditionally does not allow for punishment (Lang 2008; Gould 2010). But punishment,
for the Bush administration, arises naturally from the law, and America nominated itself
to be the judge, jury, and executioner when the rules were not followed to the letter by
the Iraqi regime.
The violence of interpretation hides power and political conflict. Of course, rules
cannot function without interpretation, so this is a violence that is a necessary part
of politics. Yet violence is the one thing that an international security order is seek-
ing to prevent. A tension arises, then: on the one hand, international security rules are
designed to create stability, certainty, and peace by giving some predictability about the
future and holding all actors to the same standards. On the other hand, rules have within
them violence, a violence that appears in both interpretive attempts to match the inter-
ests of the powerful and the violence of enforcement, a punitive violence rooted in the
very nature of a rule-​governed political system.

Conclusions

This chapter has suggested that the lens of IPT opens up our efforts to understand
violence at the global level. It highlights some theorists whose works explore the pol-
itical dimensions of violence and, crucially, our efforts to moderate violence. In con-
cluding this chapter, let me return to the example of beheading with which I began.
206   Anthony F. Lang, Jr

Muchembled’s history of violence notes that in European records of fights and duels
from the medieval period up until the present, the head was the part of the body most
commonly subject to violence (Muchembled 2012 [2008]: 174–​5). The head is not sim-
ply a vulnerable part of the body, but a symbol of power, authority, and individualism.
As such, to strike at the head was not just a way to kill or harm another person, it was a
way to dehumanize them. To cut off the head, then, both ended a life and made a polit-
ical statement. The first two examples noted in the introduction—​modern-​day terror-
ist beheading journalists and revolutionaries beheading kings—​are political statements
meant to be seen by a wide audience as an effort to establish new forms of authority.
Some, including some of the figures explored here, suggest that political society can
only be created through an act of violence; as Benjamin suggests, this goes back to the
authority of the divine which only comes into existence through some violence imposed
on the other.
The case of the shrunken heads is more complex, though it also links politics and vio-
lence. As noted, obtaining shrunken heads in the nineteenth century came out of an
effort to “understand” and “explain” native populations, and to demonstrate the innate
civilized properties of those who did not need to resort to such methods. These assump-
tions about the colonizer and the colonized are ones that Fanon tried to reverse in his
ideas about the uses of violence. It was no longer the case that only the powerful could
inflict violence or reap the benefits of the natives’ violence; rather, violence is something
that creates new forms of agency for those long deprived of it. Further, the underlying
scientific and historical benefits that come from studying shrunken heads suggests that
even the most professed rational and enlightened ideals may be part of a set of political
practices steeped in violence.
The review of different ways to moderate violence, from religion to social norms
to law, should not be seen as fruitless, however. The point of subjecting some of these
approaches to a critical analysis is not to suggest that we cannot moderate violence,
for we most certainly can. The point is that in so doing, being attentive to the political
dimensions of these practices means demonstrating the ways in which they can control
violence while also enabling it. Other chapters in this section of the Handbook look to
more detailed efforts to understand and moderate violence (see Chapter 17). This chap-
ter can help in orienting us toward how we need to be continuously aware of the political
dimensions of these and other efforts to address violence.

Notes
1. This chapter is drawn from some of my previous writings, including Lang (2007), Lang
(2010), and Lang (2014: 121–​54). A number of individuals read through earlier drafts and
gave me helpful insights: Patrick Hayden, Mihaela Mihai, Andreas Papamichail, and
Mathias Thaler. Thanks as well to the Editors of this Handbook for their helpful insights.
2. e.g. military strikes against leadership targets are often referred to as “decapitation strikes.”
3. See Johann Galtung’s famous essay (1969) on structural violence for the origins of this term,
though this is not the way Foucault understands it.
 Violence and IPT   207

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 ­c hapter 16

The Historica l J u st Wa r
Traditi on

Cian O’Driscoll

In the preface to the first edition of Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer (2015: xxvii)
declares that his interest lies “not with the making of the moral world but with its pres-
ent character.” It would be a better use of our time, Walzer implies, to devote ourselves to
navigating the ethical challenges that confront us today rather than contemplating their
provenance. Other theorists have echoed this call. Uwe Steinhoff (2007: 1) bids scholars
to “advance philosophical analysis against common points of view and to question pre-​
existing, socially established frameworks of discussion and prejudices.” Jeff McMahan
(2009: vii) is critical of what he calls the obvious absurdities of “the received wisdom
about the morality of killing in war.” His preference, discussed in greater detail by Janina
Dill in Chapter 17, is to forsake traditional shibboleths and advance a revisionist account
of the ethics of war in their place. These views evoke a deeper scepticism regarding the
study of the past. “History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford (Butterfield: 1965) told the
Chicago Tribune in 1916. “We won’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and
the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” Why, then,
should we care about the historical just war tradition, by which is meant the tradition
of thinking about the ethics of war that commenced in the sunset years of the Roman
empire, carried on through the medieval and early modern period, and was formative
to the development of international law? And, if indeed we should care about it, how
should we pursue that concern? This chapter treats these questions.

“Just”

The locus of the just war tradition is the eminently practical challenge of discern-
ing whether and in what circumstances the recourse to war might ever be justified,
and what if any restrictions should attach to its prosecution. Where “revisionists”
210   Cian O’Driscoll

take Walzer’s answers to these questions as their point of departure (see Chapter 17),
the approach set out here is different. Delving further back in time, it asks what, if
any, light the full sweep of the historical just war tradition can cast upon the same
questions.
The resulting challenge is similar to that described by David Boucher in Chapter 2
of this volume. The just war scholar is enjoined to treat the formative texts of the just
war tradition as a resource to be consulted. These texts reflect the combined efforts of
the great and the good of previous generations to grapple with the normative questions
posed by war. As such they constitute a “fund of practical moral wisdom, based not in
abstract speculation or theorisation, but in reflection on actual problems encountered in
war as these have presented themselves in different historical circumstances” (Johnson
1984: 15). It would be foolish to neglect such a store of communal experience. This would
be an act of folly akin to discounting the wisdom of the ages. For even if we discover
that our predecessors asked the wrong questions, or arrived at the wrong answers, their
example (negative or otherwise) helps us better formulate our own questions and avoid
repeating their mistakes. In other cases, a particular passage from a classic text, or way of
framing a matter, may even cast a perspicacious light on present-​day matters and ways
of thinking.
The best way to develop this point is to present brief synopses of the contributions
made to the just war tradition by arguably its most influential exponent, St Augustine.
Augustine was born in 354 bce in Thagaste, now Souk Ahras in Algeria. The fundaments
of his just war thinking can be glossed briefly. It was directed toward making the case
that Christians are permitted by their faith to discharge military duties and serve their
states in the occasion of just wars. The crucial statement in this respect derives from
Book VI of Questions on the Heptateuch (2006: 82): “As a rule just wars are defined as
those which avenge injuries, if some nation or state against whom one is waging war
has neglected to punish a wrong committed by its citizens, or to return something that
was wrongly taken.” According to this way of framing the matter, it is “the iniquity of
the opposing side” that creates the grounds for a just war (1998: 29). This being the case,
Augustine elaborated (2006: 83), “the only thing a righteous man has to worry about is
that the just war is waged by someone who has the right to do so because not all men
have that right.”
This way of conceiving of just war presents it as a punitive activity that is necessar-
ily directed toward vindicating the order when it has been violated by an act of mal-
feasance. Seen through Augustine’s eyes, the world was a violent place, populated by
people who, despite their best efforts, were naturally inclined toward sinfulness. In order
for any semblance of civility to be attained, it was essential that their wrongdoing be
checked, by force if necessary (1998: 933–​8). In a manner of speaking, then, the act of just
war reflected an extension of the state’s juridical powers. Augustine (2001a: 80) alludes
to this in a 413/​14 ce letter to Macedonius:
All this does not mean that institutionalised force has no point—​the might of the
emperor, the judge’s power of the sword, the executioner’s hooks, the soldier’s
 The Historical Just War Tradition    211

weapons [ . . . ] They inspire fear and thus put a check on the bad, so that the good
may live peacefully among the bad.

Augustine’s imagery is to the point. If the executioner was a grim figure whose grisly
work nevertheless did society a service by ensuring the given order could not be violated
with impunity, the soldier waging a just war fulfilled a similar function.
At the same time, Augustine imposes constraints on how agents of the state should
discharge their responsibilities. He wrote (2001a: 81) that it is imperative that the soldier
and executioner alike wield force with the correct intention. This took both a negative
and a positive form. The negative form is intuitive: any acts of war that were not waged in
a spirit of benevolence were proscribed.

What is it about war that is to be blamed? Is it that those who will die someday are
killed so that those who conquer might dominate in peace? This is the complaint
of the timid, not of the religious. The desire for harming, the cruelty of revenge, the
lust for dominating, and similar things—​these are what are justly blamed in wars.
(1994: 221–​2)

This is the doctrine of the libido dominandi. It supposes that what is truly harmful in war
is the cruelty it can unleash in men. What matters, then, is that men do not wage war
with hatred in their hearts, or with a desire to exact suffering merely for its own sake.
The positive form taken by Augustine’s requirement of right intention is more puz-
zling. He argues that the recourse to force should be undertaken in a benevolent spirit
and with regard for the wellbeing of everyone involved, even the person warred against.
Augustine explains this by an analogy to parental discipline (2001b: 38). If a father may
strike his wayward son with a view to correcting the error of his ways, the same logic
can be applied to warfare. War, on this view, is an act of love, and should be waged
accordingly. But is it really possible to wage war in a spirit of benevolence? Augustine’s
emphasis on interiority resolves this tension. Both the negative and positive forms
of right intention indicate that what matters for Augustine were not the actual phys-
ical acts one undertook, but the will that animated them. So long as one’s actions were
guided by love for one’s fellow man and for God, it is permissible for Christians to wage
just war.
What, if anything, can Augustine tell us about the ethics of war in the twenty-​first cen-
tury? The answer, for the careful reader, is quite a lot. The trick is not to expect Augustine
to furnish ready-​made answers to present-​day questions, or to supply a seedbed from
which we can abstract universal principles. Rather, one must read Augustine on his own
terms, that is, with his own intentions in mind and against the backdrop of his own con-
text. The reader who does so will acquire a novel perspective on how just w ​ ar ideas are
framed today. For instance, the scholar who has familiarized herself with the writings of
Augustine is uniquely placed to examine both the linkages between the ideas of punitive
and just war and the question of what is lost when contemporary just war frameworks
omit any reference to right intention.
212   Cian O’Driscoll

The point is not, as it is for the foremost historian of the tradition, James Turner
Johnson (2006: 195; 2011: 3), to discipline contemporary just war scholarship by refer-
encing it to its classical antecedents. Instead, it is a horizon-​expanding exercise that is
designed both to acquaint us with the real diversity of imaginaries that prevailed at dif-
ferent historical junctures and to alert us to the degree to which they have coloured (or
been excluded from) subsequent just war thought. Further, it encourages scholars to
reflect upon the contextual character of today’s just war discourse with a view to acquir-
ing a clearer sense of the assumptions, conceits, and omissions that may have hereto-
fore appeared natural and beyond question but which nevertheless have delimited our
efforts at ways of thinking ethically about war.

“War”

Buried within this discussion is the thorny issue of what is meant by “war.” While some
might assume that the object of discussion is necessarily conventional inter-​state war-
fare, this would not, strictly speaking, be correct. Most just war scholars would instead
contend that “war” encompasses a much broader range of phenomena, including mili-
tary contests that involve non-​state actors (e.g. Gross 2015). This enables just war schol-
ars to maintain that the categories and principles they propound remain relevant even
in an era that has witnessed a sharp decrease in conventional warfare. Yet it also raises a
profound problem: how exactly to define a term—​“war”—​that appears both central to
our concerns and to have slipped its traditional moorings.
This problem is especially acute in light of what some scholars (Strachan and
Scheipers 2011) have called the “changing character of war.” The effect of various revolu-
tions in military affairs has been to call into question the enduring viability of the cat-
egory of “war,” understood as a unified concept. As Ian Clark (2015: 34) puts it, the
question today is whether “our concept of war is recognizably the same” as that of earlier
periods. Some, such as retired general Rupert Smith (2006: 2–​3), assert that it is not
(also Enemark 2014: 6). This is not merely a matter of nomenclature. As Clark (2015: 6–​7,
14, 17–​19) explains, ethical arguments about the justness of “war” are “framed by prior
assumptions about the ‘essential nature’ of the violence that is under discussion.” What
this means, in effect, is that we cannot sensibly determine whether a given war is justi-
fied or not until we have a clear sense of what “war” encompasses. When we undertake
this task, we discover that the concept of war “already entails a broad set of assumptions
about its nature and conduct,” and about how it is to distinguished from other forms of
violence such as terrorism, criminality, piracy, and so on (Clark 2015: 137). Accordingly,
it matters how war is defined, for it front-​loads our ethical analysis, creating the condi-
tions of possibility for some claims while marginalizing or even precluding others.
If we wish to gain a better understanding of what the concept of war encompasses,
and how it primes our ethical analysis of the use of force, it is helpful to observe its usage
over time. One could begin, for example, by unpacking the distinction Plato (1989: 199)
 The Historical Just War Tradition    213

drew between “war” and “civil strife,” move on to Cicero’s contention (1991: 17) that wars
fought for imperial dominance and glory are qualitatively different from those fought
for a polity’s survival, account for Isidore of Seville’s (2006: 359) delineation of four
types of war (just, unjust, civil, and uncivil), and so on, till one has worked one’s way
through the ages in this fashion. A brief exegesis of how one medieval thinker, Giovanni
da Legnano, conceived of war will provide a flavour of what work of this kind would
look like, as well as some measure of insight into what it can reasonably be expected to
achieve.
Giovanni was born in Legnano, Italy, early in the fourteenth century ce, and first
came to prominence in the 1350s in the context of Bologna’s fractious political scene.
He enjoyed close relations with several popes, but is best remembered for his 1360 text,
Tractatus de Bello, de Represaliis et de Duello (1917), which would prove to be a mas-
terly influence upon no less than Honore Bouvet and Christine de Pisan, and would
attract the interest of Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius. As the title of the book sug-
gests, Giovanni’s first step is to differentiate war from reprisals and duels. Subsequent to
this, he establishes that wars were introduced not only with the permission, but by the
positive allowance of the Christian Lord, and cites St Augustine to the effect that, as the
true end of a war is peace, so war (properly employed) must be a good thing. As he puts
it (Legnano 1917: 224), “The end of war, then, is the peace and tranquillity of the world.
Therefore we conclude that it proceeded originally and positively from God.”
It is Chapter LXXXVI of the Tractatus that is of most interest here (275–​7). It begins
with a question: how many are the kinds of corporeal wars? Giovanni identifies seven.
The first is “Roman war,” which is waged by the faithful against infidels. The second is
“made on the authority of a lawful judge” and it is waged, not against “enemies” per se,
but against the “contumacious and rebellious.” The third is “presumptuous war.” It is
war that is undertaken without the authorization of a judge. Unless one is a specialist in
medieval canon law, the typology becomes even more difficult to follow from this point
on. The fourth kind of war is that “which is lawful whenever it is allowed by authority of
the law.” Giovanni stipulates that the title to levy war in this case falls only to the person
specified by the authority and his or her friends and neighbours. It can be inferred that
the opponent in this case is an enemy, properly understood, not rebels or wayward sub-
jects. The fifth kind of war is the mirror image of the fourth. It is “war made against the
authority of law, as where a man defends himself contrary to the authority of a judge and
of the law.” The sixth is “voluntary” war, waged by secular princes without the authority
of the emperor. Giovanni denounces wars of this kind as illicit. The seventh and final type
of war is “necessary” war, which Giovanni, following the lead of Hostiensis, endorses as
lawful. This is “war made by the faithful, when they defend themselves by the authority
of the law against those who attack them; for to repel force by force is lawful.”
These categories are quite alien to how we habitually talk about war today.
Nevertheless, for Giovanni, they enable us to distinguish wars that are lawful from those
that are unlawful. In making this case, he furnishes an articulation of the licence to war
that is redolent of Thomas Aquinas’s statement of the jus ad bellum (2002: 239–​42).
Giovanni (1917: 276) writes:
214   Cian O’Driscoll

For wars are said to be lawful by reason of the person declaring them, the person
against whom they are declared, the thing, and the cause, and the law which allows
them; and they are unlawful in converse cases. But generally there is one justifying
cause, the contumacy of one who resists unlawfully. For when justice cannot be had
from one who is liable, then war may be declared, for recourse is had to that instru-
ment for help.

This framework extends into Giovanni’s account of war waged in self-​defence. He sets
out seven questions that ought to guide analysis of the legitimacy of wars of self-​defence
(p. 276). First, what kind of defence is it? Second, on whose authority is it undertaken?
Third, who is conducting it? Fourth, against whom? Fifth, on whose behalf? Sixth, in
what manner? And seventh, to what end? The answers to these questions bear on a
wide range of issues, from whether defence of property is licit to archaic matters such
as whether it is permissible for a monk to use force against an abbot. They also eluci-
date certain concepts, such as “incontinenti defence” and “anticipation” (pp. 303–​4) that
fell out of fashion until recent times but resonate with contemporary debates pertaining
to the “War on Terror.” Thus, rather than positing a one-​size-​fits-​all account of war as
the basis of his reasoning, Giovanni advocates different strictures for different forms of
warfare.
The general insight that follows from this is that different forms of warfare may
require different sources of authorization, permit different levels of force, incur different
limitations, and generate different legal effects. This casts an interesting light on debates
about the ethics of humanitarian intervention (see Chapter 25), anticipatory defence,
and indeed the uses of force short of war. Where, for instance, Daniel Brunstetter and
Megan Braun (2013) submit that traditional just war principles (based on a traditional
understanding of conventional war) do not account for the particularities of uses of
force short of war, we might, following Giovanni, extend this argument to incorporate
the entire range of forcible options available to a society. Beyond this, we might conclude
that how we think about the ethics of war at any given time is coloured by how we think
about war, which in turn is conditioned by the ideas and material practices of the time.
The response, then, to our initial question of how to define “war” is instead to historicize
it. Indeed, it is only by so doing that we may acquire a clearer sense of the nature of the
challenge posed by the changing character of war to contemporary just war reasoning.

“Tradition”

If the term “war” is troublesome, the idea of “tradition” is even more so. Terry Nardin
(1982: 28) charges that it is prone to be misused, while Eric Hobsbawm (1983) and Renée
Jeffery (2006) warn that it is often a misnomer, and that many seemingly venerable
traditions are actually recent inventions. In Hobsbawm’s words (1983: 2), they reflect
“responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or
 The Historical Just War Tradition    215

which establish their own past by quasi-​obligatory repetition.” The provenance of the
terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello furnish an apposite example. Although one might
assume that these designations boast a long and illustrious history, they date only to the
1920s, and were seldom invoked in either doctrine or practice until the late 1940s (Kolb
1997).
The story of any tradition worthy of the name is one of development and revision
over time. Traditions are, to quote Nardin (1992: 3), “resilient but not immutable prac-
tices that are constantly modified in use.” Thus to engage with a tradition is necessarily
to “move back and forth between the general and the particular—​to draw upon gen-
eral principles in reaching particular judgements and decisions and, at the same time, to
revise those principles in light of the circumstances in which they are used.” Accordingly,
every time we draw on a tradition, we are partaking in an “on-​going debate about where
to draw the lines of that tradition, and how it might properly be interpreted and applied
given changing circumstances.” A tradition, on this view, is a site of inquiry whose form
and substance reflect the sum of its own contestation.
To think about just war as a tradition entails a rejection of the idea that it denotes a
single, monolithic theory. Instead, it involves conceiving of it as a multiplicity of closely
related but competing voices that, when combined, constitute a unified field of inquiry
and practical judgement. Johnson (2009: 252) captures this when he likens the just war
understood as a tradition to “a stream that moves through history like a river, remaining
the same yet putting down elements, and picking up others as it flows, from time to time
dividing into different channels and then, perhaps, recombining.” The implication of
this is that a tradition should, so far as possible, be viewed in its totality, as a rolling story,
the sum of its parts, rather than as an index of individuated contributions. This raises
the vexed questions of how we determine where that story begins (O’Driscoll 2015) and
whose voices to include (and exclude) as contributors to the tradition in our summa-
tions of the just war (Reichberg, Syse, and Begby 2006: x–​xi).
There are no easy answers to these questions. They do, however, invite us to consider
the perils of thinking about the ethics of war in light of the historical just war tradition.
Most notably, it is all too easy to drift toward a facile conservatism that, on the one hand,
discounts new thinking on the grounds that it marks a departure from the teachings of
our forefathers, and on the other, festishizes “classic” categories as abiding truths. This
is a charge that can be laid against the late Jean Bethke Elshtain (2001: 18), and George
Weigel (2009), and the aforementioned Johnson (1991: 16). The problem is compounded
by the fact that, with the honourable exception of Christine de Pisan, the figures usually
identified as the luminaries of the just war tradition all happen to be dead white Christian
males (Kinsella 2011; Sjoberg 2013). Consequently the vitality of the tradition—​its flexibil-
ity, self-​reflexivity, and relevance—​risks being diminished, overpowered by a propensity
for closure and reification. In this way a tradition that, to borrow Jaroslav Pelikan’s (1984:
65) pleasing turn of phrase, ostensibly stands for the “living faith of the dead” flirts with
a form of sclerotic traditionalism that is better described as “the dead faith of the living.”
The corollary of this is that the history of the just war tradition is reduced to a singular
narrative that is then presented as the only narrative. The development of the tradition
216   Cian O’Driscoll

is all too frequently boiled down to a story that runs from Augustine, straight to Gratian
and Thomas Aquinas, from there to the Spanish neo-​scholastics, before turning to the
pioneers of early modern rights theory and international law, Hugo Grotius, Samuel
Pufendorf, and Emmanuel de Vattel. Almost as striking as the ubiquity of this potted his-
tory is its sameness across various iterations. The difference from one telling to the next is
usually little more than a matter of accent or an enhanced level of detail. This overlooks an
array of different figures, issues, and possibilities. The result of this is a discourse that both
repeats and reproduces itself at the expense of fresh thinking. While this promises rich
fodder for exegetical debates, it channels just war thinking into a constrictive spiral that, to
paraphrase G. Kitson Clark (1967: 7) both exhibits and enforces existing prejudices. When
it comes to this point, tradition has been abridged into ideology (Pocock 2009: 193).
Related to this, there is always the concern that any time spent on the history of the
just w​ ar tradition is time away from the pressing issues of the day. While, for instance,
one is busy researching the medieval distinction between holy war and just war, one is
distracted from more urgent matters such as how to tackle a violent insurgency (see
Chapter 18) or what constitutes a legitimate defensive response to a cyber attack (see
Chapter 20). Historical writings may fascinate the antiquarians among us, but they have
little application in today’s world. The charge here is that the study of history is an aca-
demic indulgence akin to a form of nostalgia that cannot really be afforded.
These perils associated with thinking about the ethics of war in light of the just war
tradition are, however, avoidable. There is, as Chris Brown (2013: 38) argues, no reason
for one’s ethical analysis of war to finish with Augustine simply because it begins there.
Engagement with the history of the tradition can enrich our ethical reasoning without
taking it hostage. The work of Alex Bellamy (2006), Nigel Biggar (2013), John Kelsay
(2007), and Larry May (2012) attests to this. On the one hand, their writings indicate that
while just war principles are certainly not empty shells to be filled however one chooses,
without any regard for their provenance, nor are they entirely determined by their
past usage. It is possible to refashion them to meet new demands. On the other, they
also demonstrate that some knowledge of how these principles evolved over time can
be helpful when thinking about how they should be interpreted and applied in today’s
world. We will turn to an example of this shortly. Before that, the lesson to glean from
this is that developing a sense of the past need not enslave us to it, but, rather, should
furnish us with a more variegated perspective on the challenges we confront today and
some ideas about how we should address them.
The charge of irrelevance is also wide of the mark. While it may be true that the world
Augustine and others were talking about is different from the one we know today, this
does not strip their writings of instructive value. On the contrary, it is the key to their
worth. The “strangeness” of old ideas, as G. E. R. Lloyd (2004: 11) argues, “can be turned
to advantage. We can study bewilderingly diverse worldviews.” And, he continues, we
can use these worldviews as a critical mirror to reflect upon the limitations and contin-
gencies of prevailing ways of thinking about the world. March Bloch (1954: 35) reflects
this view when he quotes Jules Michelet, “He who would confine his thought to present
time will not understand present reality.”
 The Historical Just War Tradition    217

This presupposes a further point, which is that, insofar as it is the necessary back-
ground to the present, history is “inescapable” (Hall and Bevir 2014: 828). History,
assuming the form of legacies, path dependencies, and inheritances, is pervasive. It col-
ours and conditions how we think about the world (Clark 1967: 4–​5, 196). For instance—​
and here we conclude with the example promised previously—​it would be impossible
to apprehend (or challenge) the full implications of the Bush administration’s moves
to conflate the categories of pre-​emptive self-​defence and preventive strikes without
some prior knowledge of the historical relation between them (Totten 2010). Without
an adequate understanding, not only of the Caroline Incident and its later significance
in international law but also of the context-​specific character of the principles derived
from it, one cannot grasp what is at stake when discussing whether the requirement of
“imminent threat” should continue to function as a limiting condition of the right to
national self-​defence. Accordingly, just as one requires a modicum of historical know-
ledge to comprehend the daily news, a familiarity with “just war past” is essential to a full
understanding of “just war present.”

Conclusion

Writing in the early 2000s, Michael Walzer (2004) pronounced the “triumph of just war
theory.” The idiom of just war, he argued, had, from obscure origins, assumed the mantle
of the pre-​eminent discourse of war and peace in the Western world. It is now, he wrote,
the lingua franca, not just of Catholic theologians but also of generals, prime ministers,
and presidents. Confluent with this, there occurs now, in the lead-​up to each and every
war in which Western powers engage, discussions regarding whether or not the military
action in question can be classified as a just war. For example, in advance of the 1991 Gulf
War, Richard Harries, then bishop of Oxford, proclaimed that Allied action to eject Iraq
from Kuwait would satisfy the requirements of a just war, while his colleague Rowan
Williams, then a professor of divinity at Oxford University, and later the archbishop
of Canterbury, countered that it would not (on this debate, see Brown 2013: 36). More
recently, President Obama’s decision to drape the mantle of just war over United States
policies and wars in the Middle East (2009) provoked heated debates in the op-​ed pages
of broadsheets across the world, while Whitley Kaufman (2006) departed from main-
stream opinion (e.g. Bellamy 2006: 158–​80) to claim that preventive war is compatible
with the classical understanding of just war. The root of these controversies is a growing
awareness of the rhetorical power of labelling a given war as just or unjust. It signifies the
high moral ground in any debate about the prospective use of force.
It follows from this that how we frame the idea of “just war” matters a great deal. If,
for instance, Harries could appeal to one account of the just-​war tradition to sanctify
the 1991 Gulf War, Williams could disavow it by reference to another. The contest then
becomes one of who commands a more persuasive account of the tradition. It is at this
point that having a sense of the tradition’s history and development becomes essential.
218   Cian O’Driscoll

It enables us to discern the reasonableness (or tendentiousness) of the claims proffered

in its name. This can go a long way in bringing order to the messy debates that even the
prospect of war occasions.
Above and beyond this, insofar as it reflects a common Western heritage and set of
moral experiences, the just war tradition tells us a lot about who we—​as Western soci-
eties and as active citizens—​are, what values we subscribe to, and how we have come to
be where we are. It reflects the workings out over time of how humankind has sought
to reconcile the requirements of survival in this fallen world with the aspiration to lead
a life that is in harmony with the quest for the right and the good. From Cicero and
Augustine to Walzer, Elshtain, and Johnson, the variegated history of the tradition
offers an acute insight into the ideals espoused by human communities and the lengths
that they have been willing to go to secure them. If we are serious about understanding
where we are as a society and how we got here, this is material we must engage.

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 ­c hapter 17

J ust War Theory i n T i me s

of Individua l Ri g h ts

Janina Dill

Just war theory (JWT) has undergone a radical revision over the last two decades.
This chapter discusses the implications of this reformulation from two different van-
tage points: International Political Theory (IPT) and the real world of war-​fighting. The
chapter argues that the reformulation has brought JWT closer in line with contempor-
ary IPT. Revisionists’ more consistent prioritization of individual rights over the rights
of states means JWT now follows the currently dominant moral strictures on justified
violence. Yet the collective nature of war makes it impossible for anyone but the omnis-
cient attacker to properly protect individual rights on the battlefield and thus to dir-
ectly implement revisionist prescriptions. JWT’s usefulness in guiding conduct in war
has hence declined. The chapter argues that revisionist JWT is nonetheless strategically
relevant for the real world not in spite of, but because of its lack of practicability on the
battlefield. The impossibility of waging war in accordance with widespread expectations
of moral appropriateness is a crucial limitation to the political utility of force in twenty-​
first-​century international relations.
The first section contains a brief sketch of JWT. The second and third sections dis-
cuss traditional JWT and its revisionist reformulation, each homing in on one crucial
dimension of disagreement: what counts as a just cause for resort to war, and who is a
permissible target of attack? The final section assesses revisionist JWT’s relevance on the
twenty-​first-​century battlefield.

Theorizing the Just War

JWT refers to a body of writings combining moral philosophy, political theory, the-
ology, law, and history. It is concerned with the systematic normative enquiry into the
conventions, principles, and rules that govern war. As such, JWT occupies the contested
222   Janina Dill

space between pacifism and what is often referred to as realism. At the heart of realism
is the contention that morality has nothing meaningful to say about when states should
resort to war or how military operations should be conducted. At the heart of pacifism
is the contention that wartime violence is never fully morally justified. Rather than for-
mulating the parameters under which resort to war or killing in combat are morally per-
missible, the scholar’s task is hence to formulate compelling prohibitions on war.
For some pacifists, these prohibitions are grounded in a principled rejection of all vio-
lence. This often religiously driven pacifism suggests that a morally just war is impos-
sible in practice as well as in principle as long as war is violent. In contrast, those whom
I refer to as “military pacifists” accept that violence can sometimes be morally justified,
just not violence in war. The reason is that the non-​contingent reality of war makes it
impossible to properly implement the moral principles that govern the permissibility
of violence. A third kind of pacifism, sometimes called “contingent,” holds that violence
even in war can in principle be morally justified, but the ways in which the wars we
encounter in reality are fought mean that actual wartime violence never is (May 2015). In
other words, contingent pacifists are prepared to accept the possibility, however small,
of a just war. Non-​contingent military pacifists, to the contrary, believe that the outbreak
of war denotes a rupture in human affairs significant enough to render unintelligible the
moral principles that circumscribe and justify violence in peacetime interactions.
Realists share non-​contingent military pacifists’ intuition that morality cannot suc-
cessfully govern war. Yet they draw the opposite conclusion, rejecting not the permis-
sibility of war, but the pertinence of morality. Realists emphasize that war is a state of
exception, yet they rarely give reasons for why it should be impossible to formulate
moral principles that govern the exception. Often realists contest the relevance of moral
considerations to public, political, and scholarly contemplations of war based on the
observation that belligerents in fact follow prudential rather than principled impera-
tives once war breaks out. This is captured with the ancient adage inter arma silent leges.
This form of “naturalist realism” simply derives an “ought” (we ought to disregard moral
principles when it comes to war) from an “is” (when it comes to war, belligerents in fact
never heed the strictures of morality). As such, it is more a diagnosis than a properly
grounded philosophical position.
Navigating between the devil of realism and the deep blue sea of pacifism, JWT has
two central tasks: first, to articulate under what circumstances it is morally justified to
start a war, and second, to determine what conduct is permissible once war has broken
out. These two tasks are commonly considered under the two headings of jus ad bel-
lum (JAB), the morality of justified resort to force, and jus in bello (JIB), the morality of
justified conduct in war (Lazar 2016; Fletcher and Ohlin 2008: 20). Though the labels
are more recent inventions, the theorizations of the underlying concerns boast ancient
pedigrees in Western philosophy, with some contemporary theorists identifying their
roots in medieval Christian theology (see Chapter 16).
Resort to force and conduct in war are governed by a number of interlocking prin-
ciples. Two principles stand out as constitutive of the very endeavour to subject war to
morality. One provides the answer to the first moral question that arises when a state
 Just War Theory and Individual Rights    223

contemplates resort to force. What kind of aim is it legitimate to pursue with force?
What goal is important enough for unleashing the dogs of war? Once in war, the cru-
cial task of JIB is to determine who among a population at war is a legitimate target of
attack. This is the purview of the principle of distinction. Just cause and distinction have
taken centre stage in the writings of medieval theologians, such St Thomas Aquinas, in
the contemplations of early natural law theorists like Hugo de Groot, and in the works of
Michael Walzer, the most influential just war theorist of the last century.
Of course, these scholars have given partly diverging answers to the questions of what
is a just cause for war and who is a legitimate target of attack. Cian O’Driscoll’s chapter in
this volume highlights the diversity of traditional JWT across several centuries. While
Walzer’s articulation of JWT in his most influential book, Just and Unjust Wars (1977),
can therefore by no means be taken to represent JWT across the ages, it articulates main-
stream JWT for much of the second half of the last century until about twenty years ago.
Just and Unjust Wars indeed served as the main foil for the revision of JWT that is at the
centre of this chapter. It thus provides a useful starting point in the next two sections.

Theorizing Just Resort to War

Walzer’s theorization of JAB recognizes one just cause for war: self-​defence against
aggression. Political communities hold rights to territorial integrity and sovereignty,
and hence a right to defend themselves when either is threatened by aggression. Though
he emphasizes the moral value of political communities, Walzer claims that the rights
of collectives are derived from the benefits they afford to the individuals constituting
them (1977: 53ff.). Walzer denies that safe human life is possible beyond the state. In a
hypothetical social contract individuals therefore “concede [ . . . ] aspects of their lib-
erty to the community, to secure greater freedom for all” (Lazar 2016). Respecting polit-
ical communities, then, means protecting the common life individuals have collectively
fashioned for themselves.
If the justification for self-​defence is protecting individual rights, are states permit-
ted to resort to force in order to secure individual rights on other states’ territories? In
this reading of JWT, humanitarian intervention is a just cause only under exceptional
circumstances. While any aggression against a state’s territorial integrity is cause for
defensive war, not just any denial of individual rights is cause for intervention. After
all, the latter violates another state’s territorial integrity and hence its citizens’ right to
self-​determination. This is permissible only if the social contract between the state and
its citizens is already manifestly disrupted (1978: 214). This is only ever the case when the
deprivation of individual rights is so severe that it “shocks the conscience of mankind”
(1977: 107), for instance in “cases of enslavement or massacre” (pp. 90, 101).
Revisionist JWT raises three major challenges to what theorists have denounced as a
“deficient account of human rights” (Luban 1980: 394) underlying Walzer’s theorization
of just cause (also Beitz 1980; Wasserstrom 1978). First, if individual or human rights
224   Janina Dill

were the touchstone of Walzer’s theory, he would have to restrict the scope of the right
to self-​defence to states that in fact benefit their citizens. Luban maintains that the social
contract is often “a myth. It suggests reciprocity, coincident interests, mutual obligation,
formal equality of the parties. But the presence of these features is not a conceptual truth
about the nation-​state, nor [ . . . ] a factual one” (1980: 394). Walzer accepts that “[t]‌he
moral standing of any particular state depends upon the reality of the common life it
protects” (1977: 54). Yet he does not articulate exceptions to states’ right to self-​defence
against aggression, but simply “assumes the justice of defensive war.”
If we take seriously the idea that the individual is the sole locus of moral value and
the rights of states are entirely derivative, a defective social contract is not the only pos-
sible reason for why resort to war against outside invasion could fail to be justified.
For Walzer, “[e]‌very violation of the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of an
independent state is called aggression” (1977: 52) and warrants a resort to force in self-​
defence. Revisionist JWT challenges this contention with the scenario of an invasion
that violates the state’s territorial integrity but not its citizens’ security (Rodin 2002). Of
course, such a “mere” political or bloodless invasion would still interfere with individ-
uals’ exercise of self-​determination. Would that not be enough to ground the state’s right
to respond with force?
It is crucial here to note a point to which the discussion will return in the next two
sections. Revisionist JWT highlights that even a defensive war adhering as best as pos-
sible to JIB inevitably ends up harming some individuals who are not fully liable to that
fate. Warfare always infringes fundamental individual rights. As a result, establishing a
just cause always means calculating which is the lesser evil, resorting to war or refrain-
ing from using force. If a bloodless invasion only violates individuals’ political rights,
but a response with force would also endanger their physical security, not resorting to
war in self-​defence may be the lesser evil. Unless we recognize an independent value in
upholding the community’s territorial integrity which could tip the scales in favour of
defensive war, self-​defence can fail to be a just cause for war against a bloodless invasion.
While revisionists hence suggest that Walzer articulates an unduly broad right to
defensive war, they have criticized—​and this is the third challenge—​that he places the
threshold for humanitarian intervention too high. As adumbrated, it is only the denial
of human rights severe enough to shock the conscience of mankind that warrants out-
side interference according to traditional JWT. The systematic deprivation of political
freedoms, for instance, would not be sufficient, even though political oppression nul-
lifies one justification for a state’s right to territorial integrity according to Walzer—​the
protection of political self-​determination. Walzer appeals here to cultural and historical
pluralism, and corresponding differences in how societies are governed and how indi-
viduals actualize their right to self-​determination (1978: 21). His commitment to plural-
ism does not only render him sceptical that an outside intervener could judge whether
a people without democratic self-​determination welcomes “liberation” by force; he also
considers pluralism and diversity values in their own right (p. 21).
Some states that fail to grant democratic self-​determination still protect their citizens’
physical security. However, violently oppressive states may well provide no benefits to
 Just War Theory and Individual Rights    225

their citizens at all. Yet as long as a state’s unjustified harming of its own citizens remains
below the threshold of “shocking the conscience of mankind,” those states retain their
right to territorial integrity, or so Walzer argues. This suggests that in his account states’
rights are ultimately not derived from individual rights (see also Doppelt 1980). Indeed,
a collective right to territorial integrity can override individuals’ rights to physical integ-
rity when the former is upheld at the expense of the latter below the threshold of per-
missible humanitarian intervention. Luban correctly observes that Walzer’s “making
pluralism the overriding value is incompatible [ . . . ] with a theory that grants universal
human rights” (1980: 398).
The revision of traditional JAB hence amounts to a reformulation of justified
resort to war based on the principle that individuals are the sole locus of moral value.
Communities have moral value and hold rights only to the extent that they actually
benefit individuals. Individual rights are conceived of as universal rather than subject
to a pluralist reservation. A state has a just cause for war (whether in self-​defence or
to intervene in another state) if and only if resort to force would be the lesser evil in
terms of individual rights infringements. Revisionist just war theorists by no means
agree on all aspects of JAB. For instance, whether communities have derivative moral
value or whether the right to collective self-​defence is really nothing more than the sum
total of the constituting individuals’ rights to self-​defence is controversial. Yet revi-
sionists universally deny that physical integrity rights are culturally contingent and
that communities have intrinsic moral value. They hence reject both pluralism and
communitarianism.
The endorsement of universal human rights is extremely common in contemporary
IPT (Durkheim 1973; Elliott 2007; see Chapter 22). Far and few between are communi-
tarian views that conceive of the possibility not only that communities carry independ-
ent moral value but that states’ rights might trump individual rights (see Chapter 3).
Similarly, pluralism—​specifically, the notion that even physical integrity rights might
be culturally contingent—​is a fringe position (Gavison 2013). The move from traditional
JWT based on Walzer’s mildly communitarian and definitely pluralist conception of just
resort to force to one that is consistently individualist and universalist hence means that
the theorization of JAB now tracks the principles dominant in IPT.

Theorizing Just Conduct in War

Though the actors, means, and methods of warfare have significantly changed over the
course of history, war has always been conceived of as a minimally organized, collect-
ive use of violence in which each side tries to achieve its goals by “killing people and
breaking things” on the other side. Subjecting warfare to rules amounts to an endeav-
our to convince belligerents that in this exchange of violence not everyone and every-
thing is fair game. The first task of JIB is therefore to draw a line between individuals
who may and those who may not be deliberately attacked. According to traditional JWT
226   Janina Dill

this line is between combatants and civilians. All combatants are permissible targets of
deliberate attack until they are hors de combat because they are wounded, have surren-
dered, or have been taken prisoner. In contrast, civilians are prima facie immune from
intentional harm.
How can this radically different status of individuals be morally justified? Walzer
again appeals to individual rights (1977: 135, 137). A combatant has forfeited his right
not to be killed because he has “allowed himself to be made into a dangerous man”
(1977: 1945). He is part of “a class set apart from the world of peaceful activity: trained to
fight, provided with weapons, required to fight on command” (pp. 144f.). Combatants’
ability to threaten the enemy and the fact that they are not themselves defenceless hence
account for why they “lose the rights they are supposedly defending,” namely “their title
to life and liberty” (pp. 135f.).
Crucially, combatants on both sides in a war are equally liable to be killed, as “the
rules of war apply with equal force to aggressors and their adversaries” (p. 136). While
emphasizing that this is a long-​standing convention, Walzer also maintains that com-
batants are truly morally equal. The reason is that they waive their right not to be killed
by other combatants upon assuming that status. Walzer recognizes that not all combat-
ants voluntarily join a war. He argues that in this case it is the fact that they are equally
deprived of their choice that grounds their moral equality: “[W]‌hen soldiers fight
freely, choosing one another as enemies and designing their own battles, their war is
not a crime; when they fight without freedom, their war is not their crime. [ . . . ] in the
first [case] the rules rest on mutuality and consent, in the second on shared servitude”
(1977: 36).
Revisionist just war theorists have rejected this reasoning as unsound. The most sys-
tematic critique maintaining that the distinction between combatants and civilians
fails to reflect meaningful differences in individuals’ moral status is elaborated by Jeff
McMahan. In his book Killing in War, he points out that it is empirically not true that
combatant status systematically denotes an individual’s posing a threat to the enemy
(2009: 12f.). Combatants who are behind front lines or are asleep in their barracks are
dangerous to no one and may well be defenceless. Just as not all combatants actually
even have the ability to harm the enemy, due for instance to incompetence or fear, some
civilians do. McMahan points towards the physicists who contributed to the develop-
ment of the atom bomb. While being civilians, they were much more “dangerous men”
to the Japanese than “any ordinary American soldier” (2009).
The revisionist critique of traditional JIB is, however, more fundamental than the
observation that combatant status does not necessarily reflect an individual’s threat
potential. Even if all combatants actually did pose a threat, revisionists argue, they
would not in virtue of that fact alone forfeit their right to life. In peacetime an individual
is generally considered liable to harm only if she poses an unjustified threat (McMahan
2010: 354). The victim of an assault does not become liable to attack if he threatens his
attacker by scratching and biting. The threat the victim of an attack poses to the attacker
is morally justified. In war, this means that combatants on opposing sides are not mor-
ally equal (Fabre 2012; McMahan 2010: 234). While combatants populating the army
 Just War Theory and Individual Rights    227

of an aggressor contribute to an unjustified threat and thus forfeit some of their rights,
those contributing to a justified defensive war are prima facie not liable to attack.
Are at least all combatants on the unjust side liable to being killed as suggested by
Walzer? What if some of them have been coerced into fighting, or act on a reasonable
but mistaken belief that their war is just? Traditional JWT acknowledges that it may be
impossible for individual soldiers to judge a war’s compliance with JAB. This is one justi-
fication for why traditional JWT considers JIB to be independent from JAB. The overall
justice of a war does not influence what conduct is permissible on the battlefield. At the
same time, traditional just war theorists like Walzer have failed to explore the possibil-
ity that these epistemic obstacles to judging the justice of a cause might affect the moral
status of combatants. Revisionist JWT suggests that combatants on the unjust side may
well be excused for the unjustified threat they pose, in which case their liability to defen-
sive harm is in question.
Of course, even responsible unjust combatants do not all forfeit their right to life. If
I kill someone who threatens to punch me in the nose, my defence was disproportion-
ate. Killing an attacker whom I can easily disable by locking him in a closet is unneces-
sary and likewise not morally justified. In their reformulation of JWT revisionists have
drawn attention to the fact that defensive killing has to be necessary and proportionate
to be justified. Even combatants who knowingly fight for an unjust cause may hence not
be liable to lethal attack if the threat they pose is minor or if they could instead be dis-
abled (McMahan 2010: 234).
Unlike the reformulation of JAB, the reformulation of JIB is not even partly driven by
a substantive disagreement about the relevant moral principles. Walzer and McMahan
agree that “[a]‌legitimate act of war is one that does not violate the rights of the
people against whom it is directed” (Walzer: 1977: 135, 137). Rather, the reformulation
of JIB amounts to the contention that Walzer got it wrong: taking individual rights into
account means that the subset of a belligerent society that can justifiably be killed in war
is not simply “all combatants.” For McMahan, “[t]o say that a person is morally liable to
being harmed in a certain way is to say that his own action has made it the case that to
harm him in that way would not wrong him, or contravene his rights” (2010: 11). That
means all and only those individuals who through their own actions responsibly con-
tribute to an unjustified threat are liable to defensive harm. Revisionist JWT not only
rejects the status-​based distinction between civilians and combatants in traditional
JWT. It also unmasks as mistaken the latter’s postulation that combatants equally forfeit
their rights.

Just War Theory in the Real World

When states contemplate resort to war, the stakes are likely high. Any norm attempt-
ing to restrict their freedom of choice in this situation is very likely to be contested.
International law (IL), which largely aligns with Walzer’s take on JWT, bears this out.
228   Janina Dill

It prohibits the resort to force except in cases of self-​defence against an armed attack.
Most appeals to this comparatively straightforward rule of self-​defence against armed
attack have been intensely controversial. Debates coalesce around such questions as
what kind of action by a state or non-​state actor qualifies as an armed attack. Although
they are anything but trivial, most questions arising in the application of IL and thus
traditional JAB can in theory be answered with an operationalization of the rule’s elem-
ents. Every time the rule meets a real-​world case, open-​ended terms like “armed attack”
are concretized.
Implementing revisionist JAB may raise similar questions of subsuming real-world
scenarios under open-​ended concepts; but it also poses a much more fundamental chal-
lenge. As explained above, it demands that a would-​be belligerent engages in a calcula-
tion of whether resort to force would entail fewer or more infringements of individual
rights than not responding militarily to an aggression or a humanitarian catastrophe.
This not merely requires divining the intended and unintended consequences of one’s
own actions. The extent to which a defensive war jeopardizes individual rights—​which
rights, for how many individuals, and how severely—​also depends on the reactions
of the aggressor. In many cases it is therefore simply unfeasible to determine ex ante
whether resort to force is the lesser evil. Unlike applying the rule that every armed attack
justifies defensive war, a forward-​looking “lesser evil” assessment does not get more
concrete and thus easier every time.
There may still be cases in which it is relatively safe to assert that resorting to force is
the lesser evil compared with letting an aggression or humanitarian catastrophe unfold.
Moreover, in case of doubt—​which I have argued elsewhere will be most cases (Dill
2012)—​revisionist JAB would require a state to let people die at the hands of an aggres-
sor or evil regime rather than kill people potentially unjustifiably. The demands of revi-
sionist JAB can hence in principle be met. In contrast, once war has broken out, only an
omniscient combatant could directly and faithfully follow the strictures of revisionist
JIB. Distinguishing between combatants and civilians amidst the proverbial fog of war is
difficult even in a war between two belligerents meticulously adhering to the traditional
principle of distinction. Two such conscientious belligerents would not make any more
practicable the task of determining the significance, directness, and necessity of an indi-
vidual’s contribution to the adversary’s fight as demanded by the revisionist reformula-
tion of distinction.
Could we enjoin belligerents to put into uniform not combatants, but all and only
individuals who make the kind of contribution to the fight that could make them liable
to defensive harm? Even if that were possible, it would still be unclear which “contribu-
tors” would be responsible for the threat they posed in virtue of their involvement in the
fight. Responsibility ultimately hinges on an individual’s state of mind, which is hard
enough to determine in a court of law and impossible on the battlefield. Of course, if an
individual in war wanted to make sure she did not wrong another by killing them, revi-
sionist JIB would also require that the intended harm was proportionate to the threat
posed by the targeted individual, and that it was indeed necessary to harm them in order
to neutralize that threat. Killing in war would have to be “completely individuated both
 Just War Theory and Individual Rights    229

to the agent and to the specific act” (Lazar 2012: 374). As I have argued in more detail
elsewhere, as long as war is a large-​scale, collective exchange of violence, this is certainly
impossible (Dill 2012).
Killing people who are not liable to that fate can be justifiable as a lesser evil. That
means justified killing in bello is still possible as part of a war that is justified ad bellum.
However, this simply throws us back to the above problem of establishing in advance
whether a defensive war or humanitarian intervention will indeed be the lesser evil. The
complexity of determining individual liability on the battlefield just outlined brings into
even sharper relief just how high the epistemic obstacles are to establishing how much
“evil” any war will end up causing. Forget an ex ante projection of individual rights
infringements; even ex post it may never be evident who among the individuals harmed
in a defensive war or humanitarian intervention was liable to this fate. The impossi-
bility of faithfully adhering to revisionist JIB compounds the difficulty of adhering to
revisionist JAB.
That revisionist JWT is too complicated to be directly implemented in war is obvious.
Even the staunchest defenders of revisionism as the only proper application of an indi-
vidual rights-​based morality to war acknowledge that, once war has broken out, JIB is an
insufficient guide to the individual choosing to fight (Shue 2010). The question is what
follows from that acknowledged impracticability. One conclusion could be to change
the rules guiding conduct in war and hence IL to reflect individual rights considerations
at least better than they do at the moment. Could we not aim for rules that track those
differences in individuals’ liability that are “visible,” so that weapons engineers and pol-
itical leaders are targeted before lowly coerced conscripts are?
Of course, no change to the rules governing warfare is ever trivial. What is at stake
is nothing less than belligerents’ belief that compliance with (largely unenforced) rules
is not prohibitive of military victory. Moreover, rules that require combatants to make
a moral judgement about individuals on the “other side,” namely about their liability
to harm, may end up having perverse consequences leading to more rather than less
unjustified killing (Dill 2015). So even if we gave up on distributing harm in war fully in
accordance with individual rights forfeiture, and settled for rules that just better reflect
the prescriptions of revisionist JWT, it would by no means be obvious what those rules
would look like. Though traditional JIB may not provide the best possible rules for pre-
serving individual rights in war, it is entirely possible that those rules that do, look noth-
ing like revisionist JIB.
The intractability of preserving individual rights while waging war suggests that the
relevance of JWT’s reformulation for the real world of international relations does not
lie in any sort of direct implication for how attackers should deliver firepower on the
battlefield. Rather, its relevance lies in its implications for political attitudes towards war
more generally, and the role armed conflict can or cannot play in an international order
properly so called. Revisionist JWT is a philosophical argument supporting the insight
that fuels both military pacifism and realism: war presents a rupture in human affairs
significant enough to make impossible the proper application of moral norms that
govern the justification of violence in our peacetime social and political interactions.
230   Janina Dill

However, revisionism highlights that this means neither that all wars are equally mor-
ally irredeemable (pacifism) nor that morality simply has nothing meaningful to say
about war (realism). Rather, the reformulation of JWT affords a powerful caution to
political leaders against crossing the Rubicon, because it casts doubt over the notion
that war is ever a morally unproblematic means to uphold the rules of international rela-
tions. It thereby serves as an important corrective to Walzer’s traditional JWT, which
fails to acknowledge that while it can exceptionally be the right thing to do, resorting to
war is never more than just the lesser of two evils.
The contrast between traditional and revisionist JWT is even more stark in the moral
demands they respectively make on the individual would-​be combatant. Traditional
JWT absolves “dangerous men” even from the task of enquiring into the justice of their
cause, let alone from responsibility for killing in an unjust war as long as they follow JIB.
The war, after all, “is not their crime.” Revisionist JWT, in contrast, demands not only
that combatants determine the justice of their cause and potentially refuse to join an
unjust war. It also requires that just combatants make moral judgements on the battle-
field, while highlighting that even a conscientious individual fighting on the right side in
war may end up committing a moral wrong by harming another who is neither liable to
that fate nor ultimately a means to preventing a greater evil.
Beyond calling on the individual moral agent to engage in difficult moral assessments
even when it comes to war, does revisionism have real-​world implications, for instance
for the conception and study of military strategy? The impossibility of translating revi-
sionist JWT into practicable rules or indeed laws for battlefield conduct casts doubt over
its strategic relevance. After all, Walzer’s traditional JWT is reflected in military codes
of conduct, taught in military ethics classes and enshrined in IL because it tracks long-​
standing battlefield conventions. It is not only possible to follow, but indeed expresses
to some extent how states at war “want” to behave anyway. Yet, somewhat counterintui-
tively the strategic relevance of JWT’s reformulation lies precisely in the impracticability
of what revisionist JIB enjoins combatants to do. Let me explain.
Much as individualist, universalist perspectives dominate IPT, individual rights consid-
erations increasingly inform shared normative beliefs in international relations and thus
expectations of appropriate state conduct. Specifically, appeals to physical integrity rights,
which are more obviously non-​contingent, are increasingly cross-​culturally effective (Dill
2015; Forsythe 2006; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Reus-​Smit 2013). An abundance of research
documents this “extraordinarily expansive and authoritative nature of human rights as a
globalizing ideology” (Elliott 2007: 344; Dumont: 1986; Waters 1996). Inasmuch as per-
ceived legitimacy now hinges on the preservation of individual rights (Douthat 2015), the
impracticability of revisionist JIB is indicative of a prima facie legitimacy deficit of war in
the current international order. The extent of revisionist JIB’s divergence from the ethical
and legal rules actually guiding the conduct of hostilities is then a measure for the reputa-
tional costs incurred by states assuming the role of belligerent.
The extent of this legitimacy deficit, and whether or not it indeed affects a state’s
reputation and/​or interests in international relations, radically depends on a number
of variables the exploration of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. The one that
 Just War Theory and Individual Rights    231

deserves highlighting is that not all states seek to be perceived as “good citizens” of the
international legal order who are in compliance with international human rights pre-
scriptions. Not all states are therefore equally susceptible to shaming. Russia’s military
interventions abroad provide a salient example of a state that readily sustains inter-
national condemnation in its quest for traditional material power. While the legitimacy
deficit of war is hence more acute for liberal democracies whose identities are closely
tied to the international norm against the waste of human life, few state actors can sim-
ply disregard public perceptions of legitimacy.
Even a cursory glance at typical twenty-​first-​century aims pursued by states with
military force highlights the strategic relevance of the impossibility of avoiding large-​
scale infringement of individual rights in war. Take each of the five major international
armed conflicts the United States has waged since the end of the Cold War, from the
liberation of Kuwait in 1991 to the ongoing offensive against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. Each
and every one of them was justified in part with the benefits it was meant to afford indi-
viduals in the states that were the primary theatres of military operations. In the two
longest and to date costliest military operations, Iraq and Afghanistan, mission success
chiefly depended on the local population attributing legitimacy to the invader. Both in
Afghanistan and in Iraq, the US sought to defend itself against the perceived threats
associated with the “old” Taliban and Ba’ath Party regimes respectively by establishing
new friendly, but also stable and thus legitimate, regimes.
Of course, not all international armed conflicts follow similar aims. But to put it
somewhat crudely, wars in the twenty-​first century are much more rarely waged to con-
quer territory and much more often to influence what societies do on certain territories.
They hence regularly depend on belligerents winning “hearts and minds” on the ground.
While not all expectations of appropriateness towards conduct in war are purely a mat-
ter of internalized moral norms, and internalized moral norms may well comprise val-
ues other than the preservation of individual rights, the conclusion is inescapable that
understanding obstacles to following moral norms in war is strategically more import-
ant than it has ever been in the history of warfare. Revisionism or the coherent appli-
cation of an individual rights-​based morality to the justification of wartime violence
is a systematic account of just those obstacles. It hence highlights a potentially crucial
limitation to the political utility of force in the twenty-​first century: war is an ill-​suited
instrument for the pursuit of any goal that crucially depends on perceived legitimacy.

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 ­c hapter 18

Moral Dile mmas

of Asym metric C onfl i c t

Michael L. Gross

Like generals, lawyers are ready for the last war. The 1949 Geneva Conventions made
a concerted effort to protect partisans just as they faded from the scene, while the 1977
Additional Protocols (API) promulgated new rules for colonial warfare just as the col-
onies of Britain, France, Portugal, and Belgium were breathing their last. Since the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union, asymmetric warfare has dominated the international scene.
These wars engage a variety of non-​state actors. Some are international or pan-​national
terrorist organizations (e.g. al-​Qaeda and ISIS). Others represent aggrieved peoples
fighting for national liberation (e.g. Kurds and East Timorese), or guerrilla organiza-
tions wielding some governmental authority (e.g. Hamas or Hezbollah), or the rem-
nants of a defeated government fighting occupation and their own state government
(e.g. the Taliban). Elsewhere, the Arab Spring highlighted the demands of people against
their own governments where the fight is for self-​determination and regime change.
These conflicts are materially, legally, and morally asymmetric. Materially, the state
party enjoys a monopoly on sophisticated arms. Guerrillas do not often possess tanks,
air defences, or a navy. Legally, sovereign nation-​states are the building blocks of the
international order and the only legitimate purveyor of armed force. Non-​states usually
lack international standing. The moral asymmetry of modern armed conflict is glar-
ing. Terrorist groups without any agenda to gain self-​determination or ameliorate polit-
ical and human rights abuses have little moral standing. Many insurgents, on the other
hand, aim for these goals precisely. They thereby gain the moral high ground. Fighting
for self-​determination, they should expect forbearance and support from the inter-
national community.
As these struggles play out, the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and international humani-
tarian law (IHL) should govern state and non-​state behaviour in asymmetric war. But guer-
rilla organizations and state armies often complain that the law of armed conflict ties their
hands unjustifiably. The law, they claim, does not meet the reality of the modern battlefield.
States defending themselves from terrorism, and guerrillas defending themselves from
brutal states, require more latitude, tools the law cannot currently provide. Resolving the
234   Michael L. Gross

tension between the normative demands of law and ethics on one hand and the practice of
war on the other is the task of international political theory (see Chapter 17).

Asymmetric War and International

Political Theory

The normative demands of law and ethics are clear. The principle of humanity (or
humanitarianism) emphasizes the obligation to mitigate suffering and protect human
rights (see Chapter 22), and informs the two basic principles of LOAC and IHL:

1. Combatants may not suffer superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.

2. Non-​combatants may not suffer direct harm or disproportionate collateral harm.

Combatants are protected from inhuman weapons (such as blinding lasers), torture,
and suffering beyond what is necessary to disable them as fighters. Non-​combatants
enjoy protection from any form of direct harm, having never lost their right to life or
freedom from injury and torture. And, recognizing that non-​combatants inevitably suf-
fer in war, they enjoy protection from collateral death and injury when these harms are
not necessary to achieve legitimate military aims or are excessive when compared to the
benefits of achieving these same aims.
Although the principles are relatively clear, severe difficulties arise in practice. State
armies routinely employ aggressive interrogation techniques and targeted killing, while
guerrillas assassinate some enemy soldiers and kidnap others. Distinction—​or the obli-
gation to discriminate clearly between combatants and non-​combatants—​is confounded
by guerrillas who fight in mufti, use human shields, and operate from dense, urban areas.
Non-​combatant immunity—​the obligation to refrain from unnecessary, disproportion-
ate, or direct attacks on non-​combatants—​runs afoul of the crucial role that civilians play
in contemporary armed conflict. No party to an asymmetric conflict can prevail without
disabling civilian infrastructures that provide crucial war-​sustaining aid. With civilians
in the cross-​hairs, humanitarianism and non-​combatant rights may strain and break.

The Challenges of Contemporary

Asymmetric War

Contemporary asymmetric war presents a number of normative challenges to demo-

cratic regimes for whom observing the principles of humanitarianism is a core obligation:

1. The nature of asymmetric conflict: Is it war or law enforcement? Are militants ter-
rorists or guerrillas?
 Moral Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflict    235

2. Lack of uniforms, human shields and the problem of discrimination: How do state
armies identify and protect non-​combatants during armed conflict?
3. Civilian participation and the problem of liability: What is the status of civil-
ians who take an active role in the fighting? At what point do civilians lose their
immunity?
4. Soft war: Increasingly, belligerents turn to soft war: nonkinetic tactics that include
cyber terrorism, economic warfare, and public diplomacy. Does this level the
playing field or offer non-​state actors an advantage?
5. Guerrilla war: What laws and norms bind guerrillas?

Answering these questions highlights the close connection between the normative the-
ory and empirical investigation. Normative theory prescribes how the parties to asym-
metric war ought to fight. Empirical data demonstrate how they can fight. Relying solely
on theory to answer these questions may yield answers that are impracticable; rely-
ing solely on practice may yield answers that are ethically unsound. To bridge the gulf
between ought and can, international political theory must rely on both (see Chapter 4).

The Nature of Asymmetric Conflict

Because nation-​states usually regarded guerrillas, insurgents, and rebels as little more
than criminals, asymmetric wars were typically fought in the shadow of the law. Upon
capture, guerrillas faced trial, punishment, and often execution. With the passage of the
Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, guerrillas gained recognition
as combatants, provided they fought wars of national liberation against colonial, alien,
or racist regimes. It is reasonable, therefore, to speak of two types of asymmetric con-
flict. The first is the war on terrorism, and directed against groups that perpetuate ter-
rorism in the absence of any national agenda. These groups are international criminals,
and subject to the rules of international law enforcement that emphasize interdiction,
arrest, trial, and punishment. Terrorists are not eligible for combatant status and there-
fore not eligible for release when hostilities end.
The second type of asymmetric conflict embraces wars of national self-​determination
in such places as Israel, Chechnya, East Timor, Eritrea, and Kosovo (Gross 2015). While
it is common (and easy) to blur the lines between the two groups, it is crucial to see that
the practice of terrorism varies widely. National groups do not use terrorism exclusively
and, in fact, most prefer to fight state armies rather than target non-​combatants. But this
varies considerably. While 68 per cent of Israelis killed by Palestinian guerrillas between
1987 and 2012 were civilians, this number drops to 53 per cent in Northern Ireland and 3
per cent in Chechnya, and virtually disappears in the Western Sahara, East Timor, and
Eritrea, where guerrillas disavowed terrorism almost entirely (Guardian Datablog 2010;
Gross 2015: 153–​4; Hughes 2007: 150). These data question the old saw “one man’s terror-
ist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Some non-​state actors are only terrorists, and war-
rant arrest and prosecution like any criminal. Others are only freedom fighters, whose
organizations abjure terrorism and merit recognition under the laws of war. But many
236   Michael L. Gross

are terrorists and freedom fighters, whose organizations utilize terrorism as one tactic
among many in the pursuit of national liberation. As such, they are akin to state armies
that commit war crimes. Both enjoy the protection of the law but remain liable to pros-
ecution and censure when they violate the norms of humanity. In practice, then, the art
of classifying asymmetric conflict as war or law enforcement, and distinguishing between
terrorist groups, warlords, and national guerrilla organizations, depends crucially on
their war-​fighting strategies and tactics and on knowing what goals groups strive for, how
they constitute their authority, and the nature of their organization and activities.
Even so informed, a neat and dichotomous categorization is not always easy. Where,
for example, do civil wars and local insurgencies fall? These are neither wars of national
liberation nor terrorism, but violent attempts at regime change. What is the status of
the parties to the conflict in Syria or Egypt? Where does a group like ISIS fit in? Its pan-​
national goal and brutal tactics suggest patent rejection of the international order. On
the other hand, ISIS seems to aim for some kind of national organization complete with
local institutions, a monopoly on power, and territorial control.
In the final analysis, modern asymmetric war is both war and law enforcement. It
is war when guerrillas fight for just cause—​national self-​determination and a dignified
life respectful of fundamental human rights—​and when they respect those same rights
among their enemy. It is law enforcement when they fight to undermine international
peace and security with terrorism and murder.
Given the manifest asymmetry of modern war, questions arise early on about
the right of guerrillas to enjoy concessions because of their weaker status. One of the
most central is the right to fight without uniforms so that guerrillas are indistinguish-
able from the civilian population. This concession has led directly to the use of human
shields, and has made it difficult to disable militants without harming non-​combatants
disproportionately.

Lack of Uniforms, Human Shields, and the Problem

of Discrimination
How are state armies to identify and protect non-​combatants during armed conflict?
Consider the following examples:

• “The deliberate strategy of Hamas to blend in with the civilian population made
it difficult for the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to achieve the objective of the Gaza
Operation—​reducing the threat of deliberate attacks against Israeli civilians—​
while also avoiding harm to Palestinian civilians.” (Israel Ministry of Foreign
Affairs 2010: 26)
• “[ . . . ] fixed launching positions [ . . . ] had been built mostly in the orchards of local
farmers who were paid for their assistance by Hezbollah [ . . . ] The farmers who
operated the systems received their instructions by mobile phones.” (Bar Joseph
2007: 589)
 Moral Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflict    237

Fighting without uniforms offers guerrillas additional protection as they organize, train,
and fight. It also puts innocent civilians in danger, as opposing armies cannot easily dis-
tinguish between combatants and non-​combatants. How did this radical change in legal
norms occur?
In one of its more contentious provisions, Protocol I permits fighting without uni-
forms “where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so
distinguish himself ” (API 1977: Article 44(3)). The framers of Protocol I had colonial
occupation in mind, where the requirement to wear uniforms would make it nearly
impossible for guerrillas to organize, train, collect intelligence, or mount an attack.
The right to fight without uniforms confers protection in two ways. First, it renders
guerrillas indistinguishable from non-​combatants, thereby allowing them to move
freely to and from battle. Second, it makes it more difficult for enemy soldiers to target
guerrillas for fear of causing disproportionate casualties among the civilian population.
Why do guerrillas gain such a right that not only gives them an advantage when they
fight uniformed soldiers but also puts their civilian population at great risk? The answer
turns on just cause. Guerrillas earn the right to fight when they pursue national self-​
determination and seek relief from severe human rights abuses. They may shed their
uniforms if fighting otherwise would doom them to failure and their people to persecu-
tion or genocide.
The right to fight without uniforms poses challenges for all sides. For guerrillas, there
are constant temptations to utilize human shields. This is unavoidable, because the right
to fight in mufti is intrinsically tied to the presence of human shields. Without the con-
stant presence of civilians to shield guerrillas, shedding uniforms cannot serve its pur-
pose of allowing insurgents to move freely and fight. Still, guerrillas must be very careful
about exposing the civilian population to undue risk, and must minimize harm to non-​
combatants where feasible. This is their obligation under the principle of humanity.
Nevertheless, they do not have an absolute moral obligation to refrain from conscript-
ing human shields or from fighting among the civilian population (Gross 2015: 127–​50).
In response to human shields and un-​uniformed combatants, state armies face the
difficulty of fulfilling the principles of effectiveness, necessity, discrimination, and
proportionality. This lexical ordering is important, because there is often a tendency
to jump to proportionality before examining whether an operation is effective, neces-
sary, and discriminate. Much of this is publicity-​driven. Images of dead and wounded
women and children are always potent, and it is easy to lay charges of excessive harm.
Proportionality, however, only comes into play if an operation is effective and neces-
sary. An unsuccessful or unnecessary military operation can never be proportion-
ate. Effectiveness demands some reasonable expectation that an operation will, in
fact, accomplish its goal. This is not always the case. Witness Israeli attempts to des-
troy Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut in 2006 (Gross 2008). Nasrallah’s bunkers were
just too deep. All the resulting civilian casualties were unnecessary once it was clear,
or should have been clear, that attacks were futile. Civilian casualties are also unneces-
sary when they come as the result of operational errors and accidents, or when less
destructive means are available to achieve military goals. Artillery, an area weapon, may
238   Michael L. Gross

be effective but unnecessary if precision-​guided weapons are practicable or alterna-

tive operational plans feasible. In these cases, the accompanying civilian casualties are
unnecessary and cause for condemnation.
Thus, the first rule of war-​fighting among civilians is to avoid mistakes, unnecessary
harm, and ineffective weaponry and tactics. Only then may one speak of the duty to avoid
excessive harm to civilians. But asymmetric war, lack of uniforms, and urban warfare
impinge upon these imperatives. The response of state armies to the moral imperative
of humanitarianism is both technological and tactical, and includes precision-​guided
munitions (PGMs), non-​lethal warfare, cyber operations, and targeted killing. None of
these is without controversy. PGMs are only as precise as the intelligence behind the
choice of targets; non-​lethal warfare runs afoul of international conventions that regu-
late chemical warfare; cyber operations often target non-​combatants directly; and tar-
geted killing often smacks of extra-​judicial execution (see Chapter 19). None is without
remedy. All may be permissible in view of the normative duty to mitigate harm to non-​
combatants and the practical difficulty of battling militants who fight without uniforms
and from within the civilian population. This problem is particularly acute in asymmet-
ric war, where, unlike in interstate warfare, belligerents remove their insignia at will and
melt away.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the standing obligation to mitigate harm to non-​
combatants, one must recognize that not all civilians are non-​combatants. Traditionally,
there are two groups of actors during war: armed and uniformed soldiers who fight,
and unarmed and un-​uniformed civilians who take no direct role in the fighting. The
former are liable to harm, the latter immune. But asymmetric war draws many civilians
into the fighting. Not only are civilians outwardly indistinguishable from militants, they
are often functionally indistinguishable. Some civilians provide war-​fighting aid: active
intelligence gathering and weapon’s operation. But many others, provide war-​sustaining
aid without which a guerrilla army or insurgency would certainly collapse. Disabling
these targets is essential if state armies are to prevail. The law and ethics of war, however,
prohibit direct attacks of any kind against war-​sustaining civilian targets. Rethinking
the principles of just war in light of the exigencies of asymmetric war, on the other hand,
opens the door for permissibly targeting civilians with moderate levels of force. Here,
non-​lethal and cyber weapons are particularly useful when confronting civilians who
help sustain the fighting.

Civilian Participation and Participatory Liability

Guerrilla military organizations are relatively small. Fighting Israel, Hezbollah and
Palestinian forces did not exceed 10,000–​ 15,000 fighters (Arkin 2007: 74; Harel
and Issacharoff 2008; International Institute of Strategic Studies [IISS] 2006). In
Afghanistan, the Taliban numbered 8,000–​10,000 fighters in 2008 (with 22,000–​32,000
part-​time guerrillas). A maximum of 18,000 guerrillas fought in Kosovo, 20,000 in East
Timor, 5,000 in the Western Sahara, and, among the largest forces, 35,000 guerrillas
 Moral Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflict    239

fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2010, 45,000 guerrillas in Eritrea, and 50,000
militants in Southern Sudan (Perritt 2008: 56–​7; Mapping Militant Organizations 2017;
Nevins 2005: 29; Pinto and Jardine 1997: 246; Cordesman 2003: 24; Pateman 1990: 81;
FAS 2000).
Alongside each guerrilla military organization, a political wing provides an extensive
range of social services, law enforcement and judicial institutions, telecommunications
and transportation infrastructures, and legal, diplomatic, financial, and media facil-
ities to sustain the war effort. In Kosovo, for example, the LDK (Democratic League of
Kosovo) emerged as the political and diplomatic force behind the struggle for independ-
ence. Financed largely through donations of diaspora Albanians, the LDK operated an
entire “parallel structure” that provided for education, medical care, sports, commer-
cial, and diplomatic activities (Clark 2000: 95–​121; Judah 2000: 70–​2). In the Palestinian
territories and southern Lebanon, guerrillas provided a similar range of services while
also maintaining sophisticated radio, TV, and print media facilities (Love 2010). In East
Timor, a “diplomatic front” and a “clandestine front” operated alongside guerrillas. The
former pursued diplomatic initiatives and lobbying, while the latter enlisted civilians to
“relay messages, smuggle out reports and photographs to Indonesian and international
human rights organizations, and launch a number of daring protests” (Stephan 2006: 61;
Weldemichael 2013: 195–​217). Elsewhere, insurgent activities put civilians in the mid-
dle of the fighting by choice. During the Second Lebanon War (2006), local Lebanese
farmers stored, serviced, and operated weapons on a part-​time basis (Bar Joseph 2007).
Others provided transport, logistical, and intelligence support, donated money, or shel-
tered guerrillas. Civilians are not only physically close to and outwardly indistinguish-
able from guerrillas; many civilians perform war-​related functions.
How may states respond to these threats? Answering this question depends on the
liability of the actors. When states face armed militants in or out of uniform or civilians
who participate directly by operating weapons, law and ethics permit a lethal response.
Determining combatant liability can be difficult, since many militants are not in uni-
form. To meet this challenge, states may employ targeted killing. In the absence of uni-
forms, states turn to intelligence to determine the combatant status of their enemy.
Targeted killing is neither assassination nor extra-​judicial execution. Rather, a targeted
killing is the outcome of an operation that utilizes intelligence data rather than uni-
forms to establish a person’s affiliation and status as a combatant (Gross 2010: 100–​21).
The question, of course, is whether such data are reliable. During the Vietnam War, the
Americans launched the Phoenix Program to identify and assassinate Viet Cong opera-
tives. But among the more than 10,000 people killed, few were guerrillas (Kalyvas and
Kocher 2007). Recent operations by Israel and by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan appear
far more discriminating. Although there are still reports of mistaken identity, concerns
hinge on collateral harm (Crawford 2013). These concerns are justified but confounded
when civilians take a role in the fighting that makes them liable to disabling harm.
While states have legal and moral recourse to lethal force when confronting armed
combatants or civilians who take a direct, war-​fighting role in the fighting, how may
they respond to civilians whose role is indirect but nonetheless essential? One answer is
240   Michael L. Gross

to disable “associated targets,” those war-​sustaining facilities associated with a guer-

rilla organization’s political wing. The United States, for example, permits attacks on
“economic objects of the enemy that indirectly but effectively support and sustain
the enemy’s war-​fighting capability” (US Department of the Navy 2007). Fighting
al-​Qaeda, the Bush administration targeted “al Qaeda leaders responsible for propa-
ganda, recruitment, [and] religious affairs” (Bush 2010: 218). In its 2006 war with
Lebanon, Israel exhausted its range of military targets very early in the fighting and
then turned to telecommunication, transportation, media, law enforcement, and edu-
cational facilities. The legal justification for such attacks is weak. These are, after all,
civilian facilities whose employees do not take a direct part in the fighting. As such,
they and the places they work are protected from attack. On the other hand, states
understand that it is impossible to prevail against insurgents without disabling war-​
sustaining infrastructures and the civilians who operate them. Posing a threat, these
civilians should be liable to some measure of disabling force. The underlying moral
principle that should guide state behaviour under these circumstances is the principle
of participatory liability.
By law and ethics the status of all those party to a conflict is dichotomous. Individuals
are either combatants and liable to harm or non-​combatants and immune from harm.
Reflecting the practice of asymmetric war, participatory liability challenges this dichot-
omy with a sliding scale that links participation with liability to harm. The more an indi-
vidual participates and contributes to armed conflict, the greater force an enemy may
utilize to disable that participant. Participation reflects both a civilian’s function within
the organization and the magnitude of the threat the civilian poses. Each aspect of par-
ticipation is usually observable, marked by a person’s occupation and the product or
service he or she provides. At one end of the scale are non-​combatants who assume no
role in any war-​related activity. They are not responsible for any threat and, therefore,
immune from direct harm. At the other end are full-​fledged armed combatants liable
to lethal (but not inhuman) harm when necessary to disable their person and disrupt
their activities. In the vast middle ground are participating civilians, analogous to those
civilians working for a guerrilla organization’s political wing and who provide war-​
sustaining services. Commensurate with the threat they pose, participating civilians are
liable to disabling force.
Understanding participatory liability allows states to modulate force consistent with
a target’s liability. While combatants who pose a deadly threat are liable to lethal force,
participating civilians are only liable to non-​lethal force. There are, then, two compo-
nents to participatory liability: liability and force. Liability is a function of participation
and permissible force is function of liability. While state armies in the US and Israel, for
example, grasp the significance of liability, they often fail to modulate the use of force
appropriately. As a result, American and Israeli troops attack many war-​sustaining
targets with high explosives; and while the Israelis made some attempts to distinguish
between physical infrastructures and those who worked there (by targeting empty
buildings), casualties remained high in Lebanon and Gaza (HRW 2007; UNHRC 2009).
Applying less-​than-​lethal force requires considerable ingenuity and flexibility on the
 Moral Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflict    241

battlefield and consideration of non-​lethal weaponry, cyber warfare, economic sanc-

tions, and other soft war tactics (Gross and Meisels 2017).

Soft War: The Challenge of Unarmed Conflict

Modern asymmetric war is increasingly dependent upon soft or non-​kinetic tactics.
Non-​lethal warfare, cyber operations, and economic warfare address the problem of
participatory liability. Public diplomacy or media warfare highlights the role of soft
power in contemporary warfare.

Non-​lethal Weapons, Cyber Operations, and Economic Warfare

Among non-​lethal weapons, calmative agents are chemical substances that depress the
central nervous system to incapacitate militants and/​or participating civilians. Once
disabled, participating civilians might then be detained or deported. Fears of misuse
of calmative agents coupled with legal restrictions posed by the Chemical Weapons
Convention (1992) have limited the development of nonlethal chemical weapons. More
promising are technologies that are not chemically based. Electromagnetic technolo-
gies, such as the US active denial system (ADS), emit very low levels of directed energy
that causes sufficient transient pain to cause individuals to flee (Koplow 2006). Models
designed for urban use offer a means to prevent civilians from entering facilities or
removing them without bodily harm, thereby allowing state armies to arrest and detain
participating civilians.
Unlike chemical and electromagnetic weapons, cyber weapons target infrastruc-
tures not individuals. Cyber operations range from denial of internet service and web-
site overload to identity theft, stolen funds or destroyed data, to the destruction of
critical transportation or utility infrastructures (Singer and Friedman 2014). Harm to
individuals ranges from inconvenience to hardship to mental suffering, injury, or loss
of life (Gross, Canetti, and Vashdi 2017). To date, no cyber attack caused anyone phys-
ical harm, yet many attacks have proved capable of disabling war-​sustaining facilities
or imposing hardship and financial loss upon the civilian population. Civilian facilities
and networks are particularly vulnerable and often the target of choice.
Unlike cyber operations, economic warfare is not new. Yet both share a similar goal: to
target and squeeze the civilian population. Each targets civilians, often innocent civil-
ians, directly, with the hopes that civilian pressure will compel a government or non-​
state group to cease fighting. But economic and cyber warfare float in a legal vacuum.
They are not a form of armed conflict, so the law of armed conflict is not applicable.
Instead, vague references to humanitarian duties oblige belligerents to prevent grave
suffering among the civilian population when they impose sanctions. Cyber warfare is
less regulated still. Efforts to find a legal anchor to regulate cyber war remain a work in
progress, and leave ample room for states to wreak havoc as they use cyber operations to
disable military and civilian facilities. Nevertheless, and despite the fact they are largely
unregulated, cyber operations and economic warfare deserve careful consideration as a
242   Michael L. Gross

tool of war. Avoiding physical harm, cyber operations may prove a reasonable and mor-
ally permissible method to disable participating civilians and the facilities where they
work. Economic sanctions are more problematic. They are indiscriminate by nature and
often cause extreme suffering among civilians. In response, smart sanctions that target
the financial assets of state/​guerrilla/​terrorist leaders directly and/​or specific technolo-
gies (like aviation parts or small arms) are gaining currency (Gordon 2011). They are
not without critics, but smart sanctions, like cyber operations and non-​lethal weaponry,
hold the potential to target participating civilians proportionately and thereby fulfil the
principle of participatory liability.
Nevertheless, unarmed tactics remain problematic. Smart sanctions are criticized
because they still harm non-​liable civilians. Cyber and non-​lethal technologies target
civilian infrastructures directly, and therefore violate the principle of non-​combatant
immunity. But the practice of modern war suggests that the principle of non-​
combatant immunity is not always inviolable. There is no reason that international
law cannot recognize the liability imposed by civilian participation as well as restric-
tions on the use of lethal force to disable such civilians. Therefore, when civilians are
liable to disabling harm and when states respond with appropriate force, normative
theory should adapt itself to the legitimate interests of all parties and make room to
target some civilians directly. Assessing liability, legitimate interests, and appropriate
force is an ongoing challenge. After wars conclude, such assessments are often the pur-
view of international governmental organizations such as the United Nations. During
war, things are considerably murkier, and these assessments become part of public
diplomacy.

Public Diplomacy and Media Warfare

Public diplomacy and media warfare reflect the battle over imagery: who is right, who
is wrong, who kills civilians justifiably and who massacres them (Mor 2007). Many fear
that while Western powers win the military battles, they lose the media wars to savvy
terrorists and guerrillas. While this is an overstatement, the internet and social media
have “mediatized” war and levelled a once-​asymmetric playing field (Kaempf 2017).
Once denied access to sophisticated means of communications from telegraphy to tele-
vision, weak states and non-​states now command effective means to trumpet their cause
and denigrate their enemy’s. Sometimes they are truthful, but at other times they fabri-
cate the news from whole cloth.
When guerrillas in Afghanistan, Gaza, and Lebanon manipulate the media to exag-
gerate civilian casualties by enhancing images, moving bodies around, or staging photo
opportunities, states are often left to defend themselves against massacres that never
occurred or curtail military operations (Peskowitz 2010). In response, some states resort
to censorship. By restricting battlefield access and by blocking images of death and
destruction, the United States, for example, produced sterile and antiseptic images of a
“near-​bloodless” war. But it proved impossible to control the battlefield: images, real or
fabricated, leak out and find ample publicity in internet-​based media. States, therefore,
intensify media efforts of their own or leverage the soft power of public diplomacy by
 Moral Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflict    243

funding medical care and public works projects in occupied countries (Gross 2015: 213–​
39). The battle for hearts and minds does not end even when the fighting does.
Public diplomacy, media warfare, cyber operations, and economic sanctions some-
times supplement and sometimes supplant armed force. Largely unaddressed by law
and ethics, these practices force normative adjustments, and highlight the synergy of
normative theory and empirical investigation in international political theory. Similar
considerations also compel us to re-​examine the duties of guerrillas and insurgents.

Guerrillas and Insurgents

Often painting them as terrorists, many states decry guerrillas and insurgents as unlaw-
ful combatants unworthy of any of the rights due to war fighters. This conclusion is pre-
mature. Instead, we can think as cogently about just guerrilla war as we can about just
state war, and ascertain the rights and duties of guerrillas accordingly.
Just guerrilla warfare hinges on the just cause that guerrilla organizations must
embrace if they wish to fight. Just cause is not territorial defence but more fundamen-
tal: the right to self-​determination and the right to a dignified life anchored in respect
for basic human rights. The first, self-​determination, offers grounds for a territorial
nation-​state or region of national autonomy within which to realize the second, a digni-
fied life. Denied one or the other by a brutal or occupying regime, a people earn the right
to fight. Of course, the right to fight does not allow anyone to fight by any means whatso-
ever. Political theory makes normative demands upon guerrillas that are consistent with
those incumbent on any belligerent. These demands require respect for the principles of
humanity outlined at the head of this chapter. Thus, guerrillas incur the very same obli-
gations as state soldiers do.
Nevertheless, there is considerable room to test the normative demands of theory
against the empirical demands of asymmetric war. We have already seen how the law
of armed conflict has bent the rules of uniformed fighting to give national liberation
movements a fighting chance against state armies when their cause is just. The right to
fight without uniforms also opens the door to human shielding when militants choose
to fight among civilians. Like state actors, guerrillas may invoke the principle of par-
ticipatory liability and target participating civilians, whether through cyber operations
or conventional attacks against war-​sustaining facilities following warnings to evacuate
(a tactic not uncommon to the IRA in the 1990s, for example: Rogers 2000). Likewise,
one may make room for targeted killing, sanctions and boycotts, and concerted media
campaigns by guerrilla organizations. If normative theory does not well regulate eco-
nomic or media warfare (and it does not), then the same leeway accorded to states when
they impose blockades or disseminate propaganda should be accorded to guerrillas and
insurgents. Provided, of course, that their cause is just.
Just cause also imposes certain obligations on bystander states and the international
community. In recent years, there has been growing interest in the responsibility to pro-
tect (R2P) (see Chapter 25). R2P is a proactive policy that should benefit an oppressed
244   Michael L. Gross

people. And, indeed, guerrilla armies in East Timor, Kosovo, and Southern Sudan have
benefited from international military intervention during the last quarter century.
Whether others merit military aid, in Syria for example, remains an open question.
But a prior question is more fundamental: when should states avoid placing impedi-
ments in the path of a people waging just guerrilla war? One impediment is mater-
ial. Removing material impediments requires the international community to refrain
from arming states on the wrong side of an asymmetric war. Syria, again, is one recent
example; Indonesia (in its fight against East Timor) or Ethiopia (in its fight against the
Eritreans) are examples from the not too distant past (Weldemichael 2013). There are
good grounds for denying these states arms and condemning the states that shipped
them. Another impediment is legal. Legal impediments requiring uniforms, or protect-
ing all civilians from all kinds of harm, or laws prohibiting targeted killings might be just
as formidable as material obstacles. All may prevent parties from pursuing just cause by
force of arms. Obstacles of this sort are not necessarily bad if they force belligerents to
re-​evaluate recourse to war, but they are problematic if they deny a people the ability to
fight tyranny. Sorting through these conflicting rights and constraints is far more than
a legal issue. The letter of the law must be sensitive to the normative demands of theory
and the practicable requirements of waging an asymmetric war when the weaker party’s
rights are at risk.
Contemporary warfare, therefore, is seriously confounded by its asymmetry.
Asymmetry forces states to look beyond the legally, morally, and materially asymmet-
ric condition of their adversaries and recognize their status when legitimate. And, in
the course of just war, the weaker parties may deserve a large measure of forbearance
that requires nation-​states to reconsider some of the norms governing interstate con-
flict. In some cases, non-​states are nothing but criminals, but in many other instances,
non-​states pursue just cause and earn the right to fight without uniforms, pursue tar-
geted killing, impose economic sanctions, and wage media warfare as they seek
self-​determination. In the past, states could brush aside such claims in the name of sov-
ereignty and prosecute these conflicts as internal affairs. Recent changes to the law and
practice of war, an increasingly aggressive International Criminal Court and United
Nations, and proactive NGOs have put state, and guerrilla, conduct on the front burner
and created normative challenges that neither side can ignore.

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 ­c hapter 19

Ethics, Drone s , a nd
Killer Rob ots

Christopher Coker

It was the oldest IR “theorist” of all, Thucydides who called war “to anthropon”—​the
human thing. It is what we humans do, and we do it with a good deal more inventive-
ness that any other species. Thucydides wrote his book because he wanted his readers
to care about war’s extraordinary moral complexity: what happens when social intel-
ligence breaks down and war degenerates into the senseless warfare from which it had
emerged only a few thousand years earlier. He wanted to explain how armies can break
down when some instincts get the better of others, when soldiers cease to “network”
effectively.
War is still at the heart of International Relations Theory (IRT) just as what Michael
Howard calls “the Thucydidean coordinates”—​interest, fear, and honour—​are still at the
heart of war. But our understanding of war needs rebooting, as too does our understand-
ing of “humanity”—​not only the name we ascribe to a species but also the qualities we
deem it to embody, such as the capacity to care about the fate of others. Unless we keep
up with these changes, International Political Theory runs the risk of no longer being
central to our everyday empirical concerns, the real-​world problems which this volume
of essays sets out to engage. My contention is that the concept of humanity that most IR
theorists take for granted is deeply flawed; that theorists need to take on board the lat-
est research in fields such as neuroscience, socio-​biology, and even robotics. The best
way for theory and reality to serve each other as they should is to reflect more deeply on
ontological questions such as what it means to be human, and how conceptions of our
humanity are intimately bound up with our use of technology.
What Thucydides told us is that war changes in character over time. But I suspect
he would have been very surprised at the extent of recent changes. “Men make a city,
not walls or ships empty of men,” he wrote (Peloponnesian Wars, 7.17.7). But of course
we are planning to take this road. The ramparts of our own cities are now partly “vir-
tual” and vulnerable to cyber attack. Our skies are already full of unmanned aerial
vehicles or drones. Even concepts of sacrifice and altruism are changing fast. “I hope
248   Christopher Coker

that many more computer chips will lay down their lives for their country,” remarked
an American general after a drone was brought down over Bosnia in the 1990s. There
may come a point, writes Thomas Adams, when we may regard tactical warfare as the
business of machines, and not appropriate to humans at all, and direct human participa-
tion on the ground may become rare (Adams 2001: 9). All this is bound to reshape our
understanding of our own agency and/​or autonomy. No one is suggesting, by the way,
that Autonomous Weapons Systems will take over any time soon, or that humans will
be out of the loop altogether, but we will be coexisting with machines more and more
in the future. And the greatest change of all may be ethical. “I will stand my Artificial
Intelligence over your humanity any day of the week, and tell you that my AI will [ . . . ]
create fewer ethical lapses than a human being,” remarked John Arquilla, the execu-
tive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Post-​Graduate School
(Markoff 2010).
For IR theorists these changes represent an enormous challenge. The best way to
tackle them head on is probably the tradition of American pragmatism. What the prag-
matists would argue is that at this preliminary level of development it is probably not
only premature but unhelpful to come up, as do the critics of “killer robots,” with pre-
scriptions (especially against their use); it is more important at this juncture to ask the
right questions. Theory demands no less.

Revisiting Just War Theory

Let me take Just War Theory (JWT) which is now the primary default position when
going to war in part because of its pragmatism: it is flexible enough to adjust to changes
in the character of war itself. It consists of a historically evolved set of normative prin-
ciples for determining when resort to military force is just (jus ad bellum) and how war
can be justly conducted (jus in bello) (see Chapters 16 and 17). The most important prin-
ciple of the former is that war must have a just cause, and must be last resort, and must
be waged with at least a reasonable prospect of success. The essential principle of the lat-
ter is that of discrimination, or non-​combat immunity, which requires that we are able
to distinguish between enemy combatants and civilians, and to ensure that due care is
taken to minimize civilian deaths.
Since drone strikes first became commonplace, there has been a consistent claim that
they violate the principal precepts of JWT.

Jus ad bellum: Are drone strikes, to begin with, acts of war? Is the use of drones an act
of self-​defence? And do drone strikes compromise the sovereignty of states such as
Yemen or Pakistan?
Jus in bello: Are drone strikes as accurate as the military claim? Civilian casualties
are clouded in secrecy; most of the casualty lists are drawn up by civilian groups
and think tanks, and they vary enormously. The former US Defense Secretary Leon
 Ethics, Drones, and Killer Robots    249

Panetta claimed they were “the most precise weapons in the history of warfare”
(Chamayou 2015: 140). If so, is the selection of targets as precise as claimed? Is that
the same as “moral accuracy”?
Jus ante bellum: Harry van der Linden has recently added a new category of just war
thinking that requires the military itself to be part of the equation. It involves issues
such as “moral deskilling” (Zygmunt Bauman’s term for what happens when pilots
are dissociated from what they are doing). Are they in danger of “moral injury”?
Does remote control translate into moral distance, and does that translate in turn
into moral indifference (Bauman 2012: 16)?

These questions also revolve around an issue central to the jus in bello: that killing is
consistent with human dignity. Is there something deeply dishonourable about killing
people who cannot fight back? Is targeting a militant similar to killing a soldier who is
asleep? What is new in war, adds van der Linden, is watching a soldier asleep for some
time and experiencing his humanity rather than his hostile status, and then deciding to
pull the trigger. “Isn’t to go after humanity instead of the threat an affront to humanity
itself?” (van der Linden 2015: 189).
All these questions are increasingly debated. What is missing from the debate is
an understanding of the fundamental change in our relationship with the machines
we build.

Human–​M achine Interface

There are three different schools of thought about what is happening. The first, put for-
ward by writers such as Richard Lewontin, is that our genetic potential is unresolved
naturally. The human body is full of possibilities that from the very first have required
technology and tools to become manifest and concrete (Lewontin 1982: 169). Timothy
Taylor insists that basic biological needs seem to have arisen in tandem with our emer-
gent technology: “The intelligence that makes us inventive is enabled by inventions.”
The emergence of the first tools produced an expansion of the mind half a million years
later. “The ability to internalise our own creations by abstracting them and converting
‘out there’ tools into a mental mechanism is what allows the entire scientific project”
(Taylor 2012: 150–​1).
Each of us, in other words, is bound bodily to the tools that we use, in neurological
ways we are only just discovering (Moreno 2006: 57). One example is the way in which
drone pilots are already coping with cognitive overload—​a term that describes a situ-
ation when the amount of information that needs to be processed simply exceeds the
mind’s capacity to store or process the information received. In such a situation we
either instantly forget the information at hand (which makes it impossible to store or
retrieve it later), or we are unable to see whether it contradicts or confirms informa-
tion we have already stored away. And because we need our memory to concentrate,
250   Christopher Coker

we always have to remember what we are meant to be concentrating on. Our attention
tends to wander all the time. Indeed, many drone pilots are already suffering from atten-
tion problems and low performance as a result of the long hours they put in, sometimes
eight hours at a stretch each day. Attention deficit is not yet a “disorder,” but is certainly a
challenge. It is one that neuroscientists have been working on for some time. The upshot
has been to make pilots more “mindful” of collateral damage by getting them to focus on
different things, in effect rewiring the function of their attention system (International
Herald Tribune 2011). Monitoring their brain rhythms, heart rate, and eye movements
allows supervisors to “scan” their attentiveness and so ensure that they are focusing on
the job. A pilot can be “shut off ” if he is getting stressed out, and control transferred to
others. Does this make the pilot herself an automaton? Or is it just one of the ways in
which, as those who write about machine ethics tell us, machines can help us to act more
ethically?
A second way of understanding the interface between machines and human beings is
to consider the way in which we have co-​evolved from the beginning. For Bruno Latour,
the technical is the key to our own cultural evolution. For him history offers a “master
narrative” in which human beings are seen not only as the product of social ties but also
of their relations with non-​human tools/​technology. From the first use of social tools
that we call Machiavellian intelligence (our basic tool kit) we invented material tools
that made possible social complexity (the division of labour); we went on to invent
intellectual tools (writing/​counting) that made it possible to organize human society
into a mega-​machine (civilization) via chains of command and deliberate planning, to
assemblies of machines in the industrial era ruled by laws that had a sort of “social life.”
Sociology, insists Latour, should be about the science of associations and not the sci-
ence of the social. It would follow that our social world is not an objective reality with
fixed boundaries, but an open space in which boundaries are being pushed ever fur-
ther. The social, in short, is always being “reassembled,” not merely “redefined” (Latour
1999).
This is an area of research that has hardly touched IR theory. Both Human Machine
Interaction (HMI) and Actor Network Theory (ANT)—​the former being the academic
study of the interaction between humans and computers, the latter the way in which
machines form part of our social networks—​largely remain off-​field. ANT theorists
reject the idea that either machines or human beings are the dominant actor; instead,
they insist that both are inextricably interlinked in each other’s function and fate (Law
1992: 381–​2). It is a radical theory because it suggests that non-​animate machines are not
quite the inanimate objects that we like to suppose.
The third and most popular way of understanding what is happening to our humanity
is that we are about to devolve more and more responsibility for our actions to robots.
From supervised or managed autonomy, we will progress to complete autonomy. Will
the machines, in other words, eventually divest us of our responsibility and uproot us in
the process from the centre of things? Perhaps one day the machines will no longer need
the scripts we write for them. Science fiction tells us what might happen next. Our best
hope is that will have coded into robots some form of human values so that they will still
 Ethics, Drones, and Killer Robots    251

make decisions in our interests. If we don’t, we may find ourselves so wired in that they
could probably take over without a shot being fired, and not a Terminator in sight.
Given such a radical change in our understanding of what the “human” is, it may be
time to redefine what we understand by terms such as “human control,” “human respon-
sibility,” and “human dignity,” some of the concepts that are to be found at the heart of
JWT itself.

Human Control

The phrase “Meaningful Human Control” (MHC) has been taken up by civil society and
some states as a useful framing concept for discussing autonomy in weapons systems.
The International Committee for the Red Cross and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots
point to the problems of relying on the concept once war goes autonomous (Article 36,
2013). Human control is in itself a contested concept, however, and its loss has been a
permanent feature of history. We find it in revenge attacks for high friendly losses; in the
dehumanization of the enemy; in the deployment of inexperienced or poorly trained
troops; in the issuing of unclear orders; in the youth or immaturity of soldiers in the
field; even, regrettably, in pleasure in killing. To quote Ronald Arkin, “simply being
human is the weakest point in the kill chain—​our biology works against us in complying
with IHL” (Arkin 2014: 4). In fact, adds Arkin, Autonomous Weapons Systems are likely
to outperform humans with respect to adherence to IHL (international humanitarian
law) in situations where bounded (i.e. situation-​specific) action applies (see Wallach and
Allen 2010). For it is the situation that usually encourages immoral actions. Robots, by
comparison, would act consistently because they are not situationists. They would not
shoot first and ask questions later because they would not have to wrestle with the fight-​
or-​flight dynamic hard-​wired into the rest of us. Robot sensors would allow a machine
to “see” more of a battlespace than a human ever could aspire to. And ongoing techno-
logical advances in electro-​optics, synthetic aperture, acoustics, and seismic sensing will
make them more resilient still: giving them broader oversight (and possibly even greater
insight) into what is actually happening on the ground. Unmanned systems would not
suffer from any of the human prejudices that predispose us to see our enemies as “towel
heads” or “gooks.” They would not be prone to another psychological problem, that of
“scenario fulfilment”—​the way in which cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias
reinforce pre-​existing belief patterns. They will be able to process information far faster
than humans can; indeed, given the increasing speed and tempo of war, humans are
liable to information overload, with all its consequent permutations including prema-
ture cognitive closure.
The problem with all technophiles, of course, is that they tend to downplay the loss
of mechanical control. A 2012 US Department of Defence directive identified a long list
of possible causes of failure in autonomous weapons such as human–​machine inter-
action failure; critical malfunction; communications degradation; software coding
252   Christopher Coker

errors; enemy cyber hacking and jamming/​spoofing/​other counter-​measures yet to

come on stream. In their book Moral Machines, Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen argue
that robotic intelligence need not be “super” or even particularly “smart” in order to be
extremely dangerous. It needs only to have authority—​autonomy if you will—​to make
important life or death decisions. The real danger may lie in outsourcing more and more
key decisions to machines that are not nearly as intelligent as we are.
For the IR theorist the main charge against technophiliacs is that they tend to ignore
the philosophical challenges. Would a robot that made the right judgement call in the
relevant situation have moral standing (as opposed to moral agency)? And what would
its moral standing be: consistency (Anderson 2009: 266)? If that is true, it would be a
change of the first order, because for us, living ethically has never been about optimiz-
ing the good—​it has been much more about the precept of right conduct, for example
towards prisoners of war. It has involved cultivating virtues and refusing to perform
actions we cannot reconcile with our conscience, or sense of self. Living ethically is
rational, not logical: it involves balancing the claims of a variety of goods (winning/​act-
ing correctly), and calculating how different values should be applied in circumstances
where there is often no single right or wrong.
Surely, however, it is best not to exaggerate either the extent of human control of war
or the extent to which we can replace it with mechanical means, but instead to recognize
that we will probably always need each other. Machines are still dumb; computers can-
not think for themselves; but we might be able to upgrade our moral range by employing
technologies that are coming on stream quite soon. What we are giving ourselves, writes
Ray Kurzweil, is a moral upgrade (The Times, 2015). It would be a quite different matter
if, following my third understanding of human–​machine interaction, we were one day
to surrender all human agency, replacing the moral heuristics with which we are wired
with the logical codes of artificial intelligence.

The human organism evolved from a biochemical platform. The capacity to reason
emerged from the emotional brain. In contrast, AI is currently being developed on a
logical platform [ . . . ] this suggests some advantages that computers may have over
human brains for responding to moral challenges. (Allen and Wallach 2010: 71)

But I don’t think we will be introducing logic into war any time soon. And the reason
why is that war is not logical (any more than is life).
At a conference in Pasadena on artificial intelligence in 2009, several speakers called
for Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics to be immediately adopted (Sunday Times,
2009). What is interesting about Asimov’s laws is that they are not very different from
the everyday rules of thumb that we apply to moral questions. In the tale “Evidence”
(1946), in which Asimov explored the ethical implications of his laws, he put these words
into the mouth of a robot designer:

If you stop to think of it, the Three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding prin-
ciples of a good many of the world’s ethical systems. Of course, every human being
 Ethics, Drones, and Killer Robots    253

is supposed to have the instinct of self-​preservation. That’s Rule 3 to a robot. Also

every good human being with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility is
supposed to defer to proper authority, to listen to his doctor, his boss, his govern-
ment, his psychologist, his fellow man, to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to
custom—​even when they interfere with his comfort and his safety. That’s Rule 2 to a
robot. Also, every good human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect
his fellow man, and risk his life to save another.
That’s Rule 1 to a robot.
To put it simply, to follow all the rules of robotics you may not be a robot, but sim-
ply a very good man. (Warrick 1982: 66)

On that reading, too, of course, you can also be a good soldier.

But the difference, of course, between a robot and a human being is that the laws gov-
erning the first cannot be broken, unlike the moral heuristics which we employ every
day and which we constantly transgress. Asimov’s three laws are not moral heuristics at
all, of course. They are part of the engineering; they are intrinsic to its design; they are
central to the positronic–​brain circuitry of the robots themselves. It would never enter
their mind to break the laws.
But could they ever apply them? Asimov spent the rest of his life debating that possi-
bility. Life is inconsistent and contradiction central to it. In his later tales, as robots evolve
their own intelligence, they find that exercising laws grounded in un-​human logical
structures of thought is almost impossible in a human-​built world. By far the most intelli-
gent exploration of this theme was by a computer scientist called Roger Clarke who pub-
lished two articles in Computer magazine in 1993, a year before Asimov’s death. Clarke
set out a series of challenges that Asimov had to grapple with as his robots evolved in his
own imagination, as they became more complex and sophisticated—​in other words as
they became more intelligent over time (Clarke 1993; 1994). Clarke found in the end that
the laws simply could not be applied logically, and that this was due to no inherent fault of
design in the algorithms but to the fact that moral life itself is not algorithmic.

Responsibility

At the centre of JWT is the concept of responsibility. An example of what is at stake has
been put most famously perhaps by Rob Sparrow:

Imagine that an airborne AWS directed by a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence,

deliberately bombs a column of enemy soldiers who have clearly indicated their
desire to surrender. These soldiers have laid down their weapons and pose no
immediate threat to friendly forces or non-​combatants. Let us also stipulate that
this bombing was not a mistake; there was no targeting error, no confusion in the
machine’s order, etc. The AWS had reasons for what it did [. . . but] they were not the
sort to morally justify the action. Had a human being committed the act, they would
254   Christopher Coker

immediately be charged with a war crime. Who should we try for a war crime in such
a case? (Sparrow 2007: 66–​7)

Who would we hold accountable: the programmer, the company that designed the
machine, or the commander who dispatched it into battle? The question of responsi-
bility (see Chapter 10) revolves around another theme in just war thinking: the least we
owe our enemies is allowing their lives to be of sufficient worth that we accept responsi-
bility for their death. And even if it is just a nice just-​so story, we tell ourselves there is a
good reason for telling it. You can only espouse JWT if you hold to the concept of ultim-
ate responsibility, and you wouldn’t be able to put a robot on trial for making the wrong
judgement call, would you?
But the world is changing fast. Take what Andreas Matthias calls “the responsibility
gap” which arises when a technological system is designed to adapt its behaviour to its
environment (Matthias 2004: 175–​83). His argument is that if “control” is a necessary
condition of responsibility, how can you exercise it when you do not know how it is
going to act in future? How can you hold a machine to account if you deliberately pro-
gramme in genetic algorithms that imitate the principle of evolution through variation,
genetic recombination, and selection (i.e. when the genetic programmes act themselves
as the programmers)? Matthias has in mind adaptive systems that are already in use,
such as elevators which are able to analyse human traffic patterns, typically using arti-
ficial neural networks and reinforcement-​learning algorithms to minimize transpor-
tation and waiting time. If you allow machines to learn, how can you hold a designer
responsible for any lethal decisions that they may take? This was the theme of an art-
icle which appeared in June 2012 in The Economist which was entitled “Morals and the
Machine.” “As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-​controlled
machines taking ethical decisions is moving out of the realm of science fiction and into
the real world.” Its authors urged us to take a leap into the dark; they assumed that we
could no longer be fully “in control,” or for that matter that we should even aspire to.
Indeed, what was really radical about the piece was that instead of calling upon us to
devise ethical rules in advance, it asked the reader to take a leap of faith in the expect-
ation that one day quite soon we would see the emergence of human/​machine decision
making systems.
“Emergence” is the buzzword of the day. Physicists, for example no longer talk of the
basic stuff of life in terms of inert particles; instead they talk of fields and forces—​words
that describe their constant interaction rather than their nature. From a biologist’s point
of view, living organisms are no longer thought of as composites put together out of
separate software and hardware; instead they are seen as working together, capable of
generating patterns spontaneously without any specific instructions. There is no plan,
or blueprint. They emerge through self-​organization (Goodwin 1994: 49). First-​order
emergence is defined as a property not programmed in. Second-​order emergence is a
system which uses its own emergent properties to evolve in ways that cannot always be
anticipated by the programmer. And this is one of the first-​order challenges for ethics in
the future as emergent behaviour becomes as unpredictable as our own. We need to start
 Ethics, Drones, and Killer Robots    255

thinking about it now. Scientists are actually doing so. I suggest the IR community needs
to wake up.

Human Dignity

Three decades and three full-​scale wars separate the movie Top Gun (1987) from Good
Kill (2015), and it shows. Where Tom Cruise duelled with enemy pilots in an F-​14, the
hero of Good Kill is a drone pilot operating 7,000 miles away, firing missiles at the behest
of a CIA Agent in the field. Whereas Maverick in Top Gun spends his spare time playing
volleyball and riding horses, Major Thomas Egan in Good Kill goes home and drinks
vodka in the bathroom to forget the things he has done. It is a pretty accurate depiction
of how we wage war today. It is also a far cry from the past, where pilots saw themselves
as knights of the air (like the pilots in James Salter’s seminal Korean War novel, The
Hunters). Today they are seen as risk-​free joystick pushers who are liable to find them-
selves in breach of the additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions, the “Martens
Clause,” that talks about not violating “the dictates of the public conscience” when
engaged in killing another human being. Nowhere is the public conscience defined,
though it almost undoubtedly exists; it could be said to be a general distaste for “disres-
pectful killings.”
Surely, however, the point is that for those in the firing line one missile is as bad as
another, and the idea that the person pulling the trigger may lose sleep at night is the
ultimate in First World self-​referentiality. Yes, our first duty is ontological, to recognize
that human responsibility matters because the idea of humanity matters and that it is
only by relating to others that we remain moral beings at all. But there is nothing inside
“humanity” in the abstract, no built-​in human solidarity, no moral core, writes Richard
Rorty, which provides any other absolute moral reference point. What is common to us
all is our ability to feel pain—​everything else is socialized into us by education (Rorty
1999). Is it any more “disrespectful” to be killed by a drone than by an Apache helicopter?
In his account of his experience as an embedded journalist with an infantry unit in the
Korengal valley in Afghanistan, Sebastian Junger remarks that seeing a Taliban liter-
ally “disintegrated” by the machine gun of an Apache was the most disturbing sight he
experienced in a highly disturbing campaign. In this case, the helicopter pilot came up
close. With one 30mm round the Taliban fighter literally “exploded.” There was nothing
“fair” about his killing, Junger adds, but in modern war, soldiers gravitate towards what-
ever works best at the least risk to themselves (Junger 2010: 140). We also might ask if it is
any more “dehumanizing” to kill a person over the horizon. In what sense do you affirm
the humanity of your victim in the first case, but not the second?
But unfairness inheres in a second objection to killing by drones or AWS: and that is
the belief that such killings are in some way “unfair” (just as in 1909 the idea of dropping
a bomb from a biplane was considered by many to be “unsporting”). Metaphors change
with the times. The argument has been propounded most eloquently by Paul Kahn in
256   Christopher Coker

his discussion of the “moral paradox of war.” On the one hand, we have an obligation
to minimize our own casualties by placing soldiers out of harm’s way if we can, and to
create thereby what he calls an “asymmetrical situation” in which we have a selective
advantage (we could invoke the George Moore defence of the machine gun—​we can kill
the natives faster than they can kill us) (Midgley 2007 [1979]: 246). On the other hand,
Kahn contends, beyond such a threshold such asymmetry undermines the licence to kill
which must be granted in mutual self-​defence. Without a reciprocal imposition of risk,
he writes, there is no moral basis for injuring the morally innocent (cited in Statman
2014: 44).
It is an interesting argument, but not I think an ultimately compelling one.
Historically, there is an explanation for our seeming aversion (for it is indeed appar-
ently widely held) to being killed by a robot. There is a reason why the Terminator
franchise does so well at the box office. The right to be killed only by a fellow human
being may be the oldest and most basic of human rights that we still insist upon
(long before human wrongs such as slavery were discovered). Barbara Ehrenreich
speculates that what turned us into predators against each other was escaping from
the fate of being prey. The transformation from prey to predator, she writes, is the
central story in the early human narrative, as Darwin was amongst the first to sus-
pect, and the transformation may have been more or less complete only as recently
as 25,000 years ago. For thousands of years we were terrorized by the big game that
today we have almost hunted to extinction. Finding ourselves hunted left us with
another Darwinian algorithm: in the face of danger we had to cleave together, becom-
ing a many-​headed creature larger than our individual selves. We can observe this
behaviour in the higher primates, still. Unlike them, however, we have learned to
hunt and kill big game using weapons, and we have achieved the speed and lethality
of a leopard or lion (Ehrenreich 2011: 83). Now, we are threatened by another non-​
human adversary: robots.

Conclusion

What really is at issue was enunciated by the philosopher Alfred Whitehead, who saw
the authors of Greek tragedy as the “Pilgrim Fathers” of the scientific imagination. The
essence of life, he wrote, is not, as it was for the Greeks, unhappiness, but “the remorse-
less working of things”; the tragic—​for us, but not them—​arises from the unhappy
relationship between knowledge and our unawareness of its consequences (Lawrence
1996: 146)
A pragmatist might argue that there is a good case for breaking with the Greeks who
still in so many ways have a stranglehold on IR theory. The word “humanity” has two
meanings, one ontological and the other axiological. The first refers to the essence of
humanity, the other to norms of conduct. As we have seen, many of the norms of con-
duct are now being automated or programmed into machines in the hope of making
 Ethics, Drones, and Killer Robots    257

us better moral agents. But when it comes to defining the essence of humanity, we are
a long way behind the curve. We may have escaped some of the rigid distinctions the
Greeks drew, such as that between men and women, but we still seem to be in thrall to
the distinction they also encouraged us to draw between humans and the tools they use,
even though they had no idea of the way in which we would eventually re-​engineer our-
selves through technology.
So let me give the last word to a Pragmatist, the late Richard Rorty.

[T]he Greek description of our situation presupposes that humanity itself has an
intrinsic nature—​that there is something unchangeable called “the human” [ . . . ]
Pragmatism sets aside this presupposition and urges that humanity is an open-​ended
notion, that the word “human” names a fuzzy but promising project rather than an
essence. (Rorty 1999: 52)

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 ­c hapter 20

In ternational Re l at i ons
T heory and C ybe r
Securi t y
Threats, Conflicts, and Ethics in an Emergent Domain

Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness

Advancements in technology and the rise of networked machines have perhaps led to
the most dramatic changes in social interaction and progress for society over multiple
generations. These advances have had important implications for security, given that
digital connectivity can be seen both as an opportunity to alter the distribution of power
to achieve coercive intent and as a factor contributing to vulnerabilities in states and
organizations.
The importance of cyber security as an emerging issue in International Relations (IR)
cannot be overstated; what can be overstated is the novelty of the domain. There is a
long history of speculation on the role of digital technology in security studies. To some
extent originating with Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s (1993) concept of netwar and cyber war,
there has been an extensive history of theoretical and ethical examinations regarding
cyber security concerns. The problem with these past examinations is that they often
rely on old frameworks to examine new methods of interaction. Scholarly viewpoints
on the cyber security debate tend to dominated by the popular media’s concern with the
possibility of global catastrophe brought on by our reliance on technology. The focus has
been on the consequences of the technology (Domingo 2015) without first understand-
ing the domain, its coercive potential, and usage by actors.
Technological improvement is continuous and ubiquitous. It impacts our lives
because each new advance alters how we communicate and analyse information; it
changes how we interact with the world. Change can lead to dependence, and therefore
cyber conflict and cyber war have become dominating issues of concern in the realm of
international relations. From the telegraph to the telephone, we become dependent on
each technological advance, and this dependency creates a perception of vulnerability.
260    Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness

Dependence on technology tends to drive the discourse of fear, given the complex
nature of technologies. Given the connection between technology, politics, and the mili-
tary in the domain, technological development remains ripe for theoretical, empirical,
and critical examination.
In this chapter, we will evaluate the scope of IR research on cyber security topics with
a focus on frames of threat, conflict, power, and ethics. There has been progress in the
field, but much remains to be done, given the domain’s general lack of theoretical coher-
ence, dependence on frames developed for war frameworks, and general resistance to
comparative evaluation.

The Gates Are Down?

The central contention of many scholars in the cyber security field is that the gates are
down. In an era of digital connectivity, the state is incapable of maintaining its mon-
opoly on security. This is true: anything networked can be hacked and is vulnerable to
infiltration. Yet this is no different any other form of interaction in international politics.
Any leader can be killed, any organization seeking to ensure security for the vulner-
able can be brought down through internal weakness, dissension, or inaction. Instead
of marvelling at the novelty of the cyber domain, the focus of scholarship needs to be on
what we know about the domain, how force can be leveraged in the arena, and how to
foster the ethical and considered use of power.
Comparative case studies are rare, given the tendency to focus on events that might be
outliers, such as the Stuxnet worm (2010), the Sony Hack (2014), and Russia’s denial of
service bombardment of Estonia (2007). While the atypical events in cyberspace might
enlighten our understanding, explaining the everyday and typical in cyber interactions
is often overlooked.
The other dominant frame is that of a revolution in military affairs in which techno-
logical advances have a dramatic impact on the character and contrast of combat oper-
ations. In the cyber context, this is the undertone of Kello’s (2013) work that suggests
that the future of cyber war will forever change the way states interact with each other.
Lindsay (2013) and Gartzke (2013) counter this by noting that there are many constraints
on international actors to fully employ their advanced cyber weaponry. Technological
revolutions are never what they seem, and require appropriate integration with existing
technologies to make an impact.
The controversy extends the idea that technology will add to the power and capacity
of small states. There are small states such as Estonia and North Korea where this may
be the case, but as a collective this claim may be dubious. Estonia wields disproportion-
ate cyber power because of its experience with being attacked in 2007, and is thus now a
major centre for cyber defence for the NATO alliance. Lindsay (2013) and Valeriano and
Maness (2015: 27) maintain that it is the great powers that will gain the greatest benefit
from cyber technologies. Cyber weapons are not simple and cheap weapons to leverage
 IRT and Cyber Security    261

(Valeriano and Maness 2015: 35); they are complicated, expensive, and difficult to utilize
for offensive and defense intent.
Many suggested that precision weaponry advanced a revolution and provided an off-
set and advantage during the Gulf War (1991); but studies since have called into the ques-
tion the efficacy of precision weaponry, primarily in the context of aerial bombing (Pape
2004; Williams 2010). This suggests that rhetorical arguments on the question must give
way to fact-​based examinations. There is a great need in the cyber security field to rec-
ognize that broad claims without evidence are inadequate, and that the development of
theory must be based on more than vague prescriptions for the future.

Definitional Issues

Unfortunately, much time and effort has been spent in the cyber security field exploring
the definitions and terms used in the field. “Cyber security” refers to the threat oppor-
tunities from digital and computational technologies. Like all frames of security, the
idea of perfect protection is a myth; but this is especially relevant for computational-​
based systems, which will always have weaknesses. The only way to avoid network-​
based threats is to avoid the drive to network all electronic devices. The more complex
question of protection for whom is also often avoided. Most discussions implicitly sug-
gest that the one to be protected is the state, with a focus on critical infrastructure and
national industry, but what of the individual or corporation?
Nye’s (2011) definition of cyberspace is useful for political analysis:

the cyber domain includes the Internet of all networked computers but also intra-
nets, cellular technologies, fiber-​optic cables, and space-​based communications.
Cyberspace has a physical infrastructure layer that follows the economic laws of
rival resources and political laws of sovereign justification and control. (Nye
2011: 19)

This layering of cyberspace is critical in the political discourse because it is impossible

to leave the state out of the analysis. States still control a monopoly on technology and
access through such programmes as the Wassenaar Agreement (limiting access to dual
use technologies). Institutions also play a role, with the International Corporation for
Assignment Names and Numbers (ICANN) governing domains on the internet and
the United Nations convening several Group of Government Expert’s (GGE) reports on
cyber security.
The term “cyber power” highlights the continued political importance of computa-
tional technologies. Politics is about the distribution of influence, and cyber power is
yet another strain of attempts to control leverage, access, and force in international and
domestic settings. Valeriano and Maness (2015: 28) define cyber power as the ability to
apply typical forms of control and domination in cyberspace. Resources dictate that
262    Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness

states continue to have the upper hand in terms of leveraging cyber power (Nye 2010).
States still maintain a monopoly on digital violence, and efforts by non-​state actors to
leverage cyber power often fail.
To date, Stuxnet is the most sophisticated cyber incident ever launched. To slow or
deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons, in 2010 a joint US–​Israeli effort launched
this sophisticated worm in the Iranian Natanz plant, which resulted in the permanent
damage of thousands of centrifuges that were enriching uranium. While many take the
case of Stuxnet to symbolize the greater vulnerability and power associated with cyber
technologies, Lindsay (2013) makes the key point that cyber power is often leveraged
by major states to enhance capabilities. This is typical of such states as Russia, China,
and the United States, the perceived cyber heavyweights. While other actors like ISIS or
Anonymous have been said to leverage cyber capabilities, their ability to demonstrate
power has been limited.
The term “cyber war,” as used in the discourse, is complicated and loaded. Some, like
Lewis (2010), Rid (2013), and Gartzke (2013), argue that cyber war with death associ-
ated is unlikely to occur, mainly due to the strategic calculations involved. Valeriano and
Maness (2014) observe empirically that cyber war with death as a focus has not occurred
and seems unlikely given the general resistance to escalation dynamics (Maness and
Valeriano 2016) in cyberspace. If one is going to use the term “cyber war,” it should be
used correctly, as Rid (2013) points out. “War” as a term implies the use of violence and
death to achieve political ends (Clausewitz 2007). War without violence and death is
not a war.
We prefer to use the term “cyber conflict” to describe the shape of cyber malice as
used in international relations interactions. Cyber conflict is “the use of computational
technologies for malevolent and destructive purposes to impact, change, or modify dip-
lomatic or military interactions” (Valeriano and Maness 2015: 21). This definition covers
any interactions between entities, including lower levels of malevolence such as disrup-
tion and espionage campaigns typical in cyber interactions, all the way to outright cyber
warfare—​if it were ever to happen.

Nature of the Cyber Threat

Much of the recent trend in cyber security scholarship seeks to evaluate the nature of
the cyber threat. As Guitton (2013) notes, accepting the threat inflation framework can
have a disastrous effect on policy development. Given that threats seem exaggerated,
constructivist frameworks seem to be critical in examining perceptions of cyber threats
(Nissenbaum 2005; Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009). The nature of cyber threats and the
narratives associated with them are largely socially constructed, and may lead to the
securitization of the internet in otherwise free societies.
The work of Dunn Cavelty (2008; 2015) and Lawson (2013) is important in that it
reminds us the nature of the cyber threat is often overwhelmed by the extremes in the
 IRT and Cyber Security    263

debate; nuances are more critical than the hyped perspectives typical in the discourse.
Concentrated government and private action is needed to contain potential damage, but
overestimating the threat will have a similar effect as overestimating the terrorism threat.
Poll data continues to demonstrate that the perception of cyber threat and vulner-
ability remain at the forefront of public and elite opinion. In an address to Congress
in February 2015, US National Intelligence Director James Clapper declared that cyber
attacks are a larger national security threat than Sunni extremists, the nuclear ambitions
of Iran and North Korea, and Russian and Chinese operatives trying to penetrate the
national security community in the United States.
Yet the data collected by Valeriano and Maness (2014) demonstrates a different per-
spective, observing a low rate of conflict for rival states. Only 20 of the 120 active rival
dyads engage in cyber conflict; furthermore, although the number of cyber incidents
have been on the rise since 2001, the impact and severity of the incidents have remained
constant and at a relatively low level. Nearly three-​quarters of these incidents are not
coercive in nature, being espionage or disruption in type (Valeriano, Jensen, and Maness
2016).
Axelrod and Iliev (2014) show through game theory and data analysis how one can
predict the optimal timing of using cyber resources against adversaries. Certain condi-
tions give states both opportunity and motive to exploit a vulnerability of a target state’s
computer system (Axelrod and Iliev 2014: 1298). Using case studies of several high-​
profile cyber incidents, the study demonstrates that states will wait until the conditions
are optimal—​but also until stakes are highest—​to utilize a cyber resource.
These investigations are important, but they also suggest that context matters. This
perspective is that what Langø (2013) calls the environmentalist approach to cyber
security, which seeks quantification and analysis in context. The cyber security environ-
ment is rich, and deserves scholarship that does not seek to promote an agenda.
The overwhelming majority of cyber conflicts occur between long-​standing rivals
seeking to harm each other, and exist in the context of regional disputes (Valeriano and
Maness 2015). Exploitations between states such as China and Canada are rare, but they
do happen. The lesson should be that examinations of the cyber threat and security land-
scape are hollow without a deep consideration of and accounting for the international
processes. One cannot hope to understand the dynamics of the Sony Hack by North
Korea without understanding the long history of rivalry and cultural conflict between
the United States and North Korea.

The Nature of Cyber Conflict

The idea that new technologies or ideas can be transformative is both provocative and
misleading. Major advances in technology are rarely completely sufficient to bring
about doctrinal change, nor are they the tipping point in altering the calculation of mili-
tary effectiveness. This promise of the future often colours debates and research.
264    Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness

Nowhere is this made clearer than in Kello’s (2013) piece, which asserts that current
IR theories are unable to contribute in any useful way to the study of cyber conflict, and
that the cyber threat remains unprecedented because it will expand the range of harm
in international interactions. New theories and new ways of thinking are required, and
Kello (2013: 8) asserts that the social science field is ill-​equipped to offer anything of
value now.
The concept of cyber blockades comes from Russell (2014), who likens certain meth-
ods of cyber conflict, primarily distributed denial of service (DDoS), to naval block-
ades, where the victim state can be economically strangled by its attacker. For example,
the 2007 series of defacement and DDoS incidents launched on Estonia from Russia
interrupted the daily economic life for many ordinary citizens. This attack was launched
because the Estonian government removed a Soviet-​era grave-​marker; many Russians
saw this as an insult, and Russia retaliated with what has been dubbed the first “cyber
war.” Yet this “cyber blockade” was chosen by the defender to protect systems. The
Estonians did not capitulate to Russian demands, and the attack was a brief interlude in
relations.
Gartzke’s (2013) article about cyber threats and the balance between offence and
defense is important in this context. The distinction between what is possible versus
what is probable is often missed. Given rational calculations, there is little chance that a
state will launch a massive cyber operation even against an enemy due to the limitations
of the weapon and the consequences for action.
This is where theory and IR scholarship can have an impact on cyber security research;
use of the rational choice and bargaining framework (Gartzke 2013) can temper many of
the more bombastic cyber predictions. Likewise, Choucri’s (2012) work on international
cyber politics utilizes lateral pressure theory to predict how different states with differ-
ent social, political, and economic traits will behave in the digital realm, suggesting that
cyber action is much more complex than the simple ability to launch an attack.

Deterrence and Restraint in Cyberspace

Instead of suggesting that a revolution in military affairs has occurred, Maness and
Valeriano (2015) argue that the domain is dominated by restraint rather than by methods
of exploitation and escalation. New technologies require new tactics to be developed,
but also require support from older methods to achieve victory or exploit weaknesses. A
state can steal petabytes of data, yet without the ability to analyse such data this exploit
is near-​useless (Lindsay 2015: 24). Given the limited nature of training and coordination
in major Western states, it is little surprise to find that cyber tactics have been rarely used
and are ineffective beyond disruption and information-seeking efforts (Valeriano et al.
2016).
Just what is restraint? Restraint means much more than deterrence. Deterrence has
certain limitations that have been shown to be problematic in cyberspace (Libicki 2009).
The problems of information, credibility, and variance of the level of cyber actions make
 IRT and Cyber Security    265

it impossible to articulate a system of responses as assured and rigid as deterrence sys-

tems built during the Cold War. The connection between cyber security contexts and
physical capabilities are said to make deterrence much easier than previously thought
(Goodman 2010); yet this frame assumes that conventional deterrence is possible, when
many examinations in the past have raised important problems with the theory (George
and Smoke 1974; Vasquez 1991).
Restraint is a process of self-​containment and straitjacketing that limits the option of
response because of consequences of action, not costs as elucidated in deterrence. The
flexibility and curve in costs makes defence possible, and the idea that offence is easy
when compared to defence depends on the unit under examination.
The US government has “made clear that we respond to cyber attacks in the time,
manner and place of our choosing.” This is the language of restraint, not deterrence.
Deterrence means assured response such that the attacker figures the costs of an attack
are too high. In cyber security, there will likely be a response, but it is no means assured,
timely, nor in the domain of the operation in the first place. It is nebulous, flexible, and
considered given the implications of civilian harm in cyberspace.
That cyber-​capable states like the United States and Russia have refrained from engag-
ing in offensive cyber operations in major conflicts such as in Ukraine, Libya, Syria, Iraq,
and Afghanistan is telling (Maness and Valeriano 2015; Geers 2015). Too much focus has
been directed to cyber power, as opposed to the more typical option of choosing not to
act because of humanitarian issues, legal concerns, the nature of the weapon, and the
possibility that it might not be effective in achieving coercive intent.

The Nature of Cyber

Power and Force

A great amount of scholarship in cyber security is focused on what might be considered

realist theories or their variants, with the concern for power and balance dominating.
The question of deterrence is ubiquitous in the domain. The focus generally is on mass
destruction and events generally associated with total war—​a problematic frame given
the general lack of outright violence on the cyber domain (Rid 2011). Although the pos-
sibility of death and destruction through cyber events exist, new and novel perspectives
are needed to evaluate lower-​intensity forms of conflict.
Evaluating the nature of cyber power is a key concern, but this is a tricky propos-
ition, since defensive vulnerability is highly correlated with advanced industrialized
societies. States like North Korea and China rank high on defensive capabilities given
the closed-​off nature of their connections. While the United States is the most power-
ful cyber state for offensive capabilities, it is also paradoxically the weakest state on the
defensive side (Valeriano and Maness 2015: 25). Clarke and Knake (2010: 148) were the
first to try to systematically rank cyber power, with North Korea scoring high and the
266    Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness

United States scoring low. Russia, China, and Iran are ranked between these extremes
in terms of cyber strength. Valeriano and Maness (2015: 25) standardize and extend this
effort with modifications that consider how different sectors are protected, how much
states engage with others in cyber conflict, and the ratio of connectivity to successful
breaches.
This leads us to considerations of the balance of cyber power. Because estimating the
nature of cyber power is difficult given the general secrecy in the domain, it is difficult
to measure the balance of power, and therefore it is near-​impossible to judge whether
there is a stable balance of power. The idea that offence dominates in cyberspace is expli-
cit or implicit in many cyber security research articles. Offence is said to be easy and
defence difficult, since exploits are easy to buy on the black market, and when they are
connected, avenues of attack manifest. In addition, basic cyber hygiene is almost nonex-
istent in major industrial targets.
This still does not mean that offence dominates, and we prefer to leave this question
to empirical evaluation. Some states seem to have mastered defence. Israel is attacked
and probed millions of times a day and repels all basic attacks. The United States is like-
wise probed exhaustively. The violations that do occur tend to come through third-​party
vendors or contractors.
Lindsay and Gartzke (2015) argue instead that deception may have the advantage in
cyberspace. With tactics such as honeypots and traps possible, attackers can be easily
tricked. On the other hand, the issue of data integrity is a key future concern, given the
possibly that data can be deleted or altered. This idea shifts our conception of power in
a new direction, beyond the simple balance between offence and defence, and suggests
that these issues are much more complicated in cyber security interactions.
Theorizing about the nature of cyber power is therefore in its infancy. Many assump-
tions are made about the nature of offence and defence, with little connection to the
observed. Nye (2010: 5) notes that because the internet was “designed for ease of use
rather than security, the offense currently has the advantage over the defense.” Yet as
cyber conflict continues to proliferate, this may not always be the case.
What does seem probable is the rise of proxy actors in cyberspace. As in the arena of
terrorism, state actors can use proxy actors to conduct operations and achieve strategic
goals (Conrad 2011; Maoz and San-​Acka 2012). This is where the attribution and respon-
sibility problem in cyberspace comes to the forefront. Our ability to achieve attribution
has been greatly enhanced in recent years (Rid and Buchanan 2014), but deniability can
be achieved if proxy actors are used to conduct operations.
The nebulous and disjointed nature of cyber control does pose problems and possibil-
ities. Many major states like Brazil and those in the European Union focus on strength
through resilience rather than through offensive capabilities. Violations in cyberspace
will always occur; yet the most common vulnerability in all frames of security is often
the human actor, and this necessitates a return to the individual level of analysis and
considerations of everyday harm in cyberspace. The fear reaction we have built up in
this domain dominates (Gross et al. 2015), but it is not clear if this perception should
stand out, given the remarkable amount of stability in the system.
 IRT and Cyber Security    267

Moving beyond frameworks of power, fear, and threat might be opportune at this
moment in scholarship. There is a great need to evaluate the nature of cyber espion-
age (Gartzke 2013; Valeriano and Maness 2015: 4), given that cyber conflict more often
than not involves information warfare and disruption, rather than coercion. This then
connects cyber security scholarship with the discourses on privacy and surveillance—​a
needed turn in the field (Rid and Moore 2016).

Cyber Institutions and Governance

What tends to be missed quite often in cyber discourse is the perspective of what might
be called liberal theories or institutions. Clear theoretical accounts of the development
of institutions that govern cyber interactions are sparse and the field would greatly bene-
fit from regime theory (Choucri et al. 2013).
A multi-​stakeholder model, where state-​based actors work with corporations and
individuals to develop functional models of international governance, does exist, with
ICANN being an example (de la Chapelle 2007). Indeed, the interaction between public
and private is the key nexus of cyber security relationships in many industrialized econ-
omies such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Public–​private cooperation
to ensure protection of critical infrastructure goes back to the Marsh Commission in
1997. Yet this relationship is complicated, with the state (the public) having difficulty jus-
tifying its role, given concerns about privacy and general misgivings about sharing too
much with government.
True multi-​level stakeholder methods of governance and representation are needed,
especially when many instances of cyber repression, where the state takes actions against
individuals, demonstrate the limitations of cooperation between private and public sec-
tors. The promise of the internet as a forum for the development of civil society and
democracy promotion has not been achieved, and this might be due to the residual
power controls implemented by major powers. Indeed, any model of global governance
of the internet must contend with the fact that states are necessary actors in the domain
(Cornish 2015).
There is a possibly that the nature of sovereignty (Wendt and Duvall 2008) may
change with the introduction of new ideas and concepts. Yet the reality is that the rise
of the global internet has not developed into a new global common (Cornish 2015), but
instead has prompted extensions of government responsibility and control (Tikk 2011;
Demchak and Dombrowski 2011).
Maness and Valeriano (2015) begin to articulate what might start to amount to a lib-
eral preference theory (Moravcsik 1997) in cyber interactions in their examination of
the impact of cyber conflict and cooperation at the dyadic level. They find that when a
state tries to utilize DDoS attacks or change the behaviour of the enemy, the level of con-
flict between two states increases. All other attacks, such as intelligence operations or
disruption tactics, have a varied and unsystematic impact on relationships. Some states,
268    Brandon Valeriano and Ryan C. Maness

like China and the United States, seem to cooperate more after an attack; this is probably
because the issues at stake in cyber actions are of such low salience that they do not pro-
voke antagonistic reactions. This would suggest some fundamental ordering of prefer-
ences surrounding cyber actions: only certain actions, such as those that are remarkably
public or seek to force someone to change behaviour, are detrimental to relationships.

The Legalist/​Moralist Debate

The call for norms of action in cyber security is strong: just about every major statement
on cyber security by state leadership tends to invoke a call for shared norms of behav-
iour. For example, in September of 2015, when Chinese President Xi Jingping was mak-
ing his state visit to the United States, President Obama remarked, “We’ll work together,
and with other nations, to promote international rules of the road for appropriate con-
duct in cyberspace.”
As the major cyber powers, the United States, China, and Russia, are beginning to
formalize agreements on their respective behaviours in cyberspace, empirical analysis
(Valeriano and Maness 2015: ch. 4) suggests that informal modes of restrained behaviour
have already been employed for at least the last fifteen years. The transition that needs to
happen now is to shift these normative outcomes into institutionalized outcomes.
What can be achieved now is the continued encouragement of restrained behaviour
by establishing and encouraging a system of justice and proportionality, to mitigate
escalation between international actors for the foreseeable future. The Just War tradition
may be the optimal existing framework for this new and growing domain, given consid-
erations for harm of innocents (almost assured in the cyber domain, where there is no
separation between the military and public) and proportionality (Cook 2010; Valeriano
and Maness 2015; see Chapter 16). Adding in moral considerations (Fixdal and Smith
1998) is important, given that the possibility for civilian harm is pivotal in cyber security.
Legal frameworks are often problematic (Goldstone 1998; Spinello 2010; Dipert
2010: 395) and permissive (Eberle 2012). While international legal frameworks can
apply to cyberspace (Schmitt 2013), just how different frameworks apply is the subject of
much debate. Many reports and investigators seek either to justify offensive behaviour
or to explore the novelty of the domain. The Tallinn Manual released in 2013 (Schmitt
2013) was a promising attempt to forge agreement, but differences of opinion remain
between state representatives and even between the various authors.
To prevent tragedy (Brown 2007), Valeriano and Maness (2015) propose a system of
justice for the use of cyber technologies where states are incentivized to maintain con-
tinued restraint. A system of cyber justice can be based on the idea of the Just War trad-
ition, where cyber response is managed and proportional, and where civilian harm is
off-​limits (O’Driscoll 2008). These practices need continued reinforcement in inter-
national forums such as the UN. The goal is to encourage positive cyber practices as a
matter of policy.
 IRT and Cyber Security    269

Conclusion

While the field of cyber security is not new, the intellectual maturity of the perspective
is developing. Much of the work to be done in the future requires greater consideration
of methods, empirics, and evidence, as well as critical epistemological approaches that
would challenge the nature of the institutional arrangements concerning cyber ques-
tions. The ethical limitations of cyber actions seem clear, given the potential harm to
both civilians and observers. What is needed is greater care in demonstrating the stra-
tegic limitations and positive possibilities of cyber actions.
There is much the field can learn from the perspectives of IR theory and ethics.
Emerging policy areas need not be filled with reactionary perspectives. Preferring the
“island of theory” approach advocated by Guetzkow (1950), no one scholar can attempt
to tackle the great majority of cyber security questions. Instead, questions need to be
parcelled out and investigated by teams combining skills and abilities. Collaboration
and careful relationship-​building is needed to achieve progress in this critical domain.
The cyber domain will be an arena continually in need of reset and monitoring, given
its importance. International institutions can be a path of stability, as would be controls
instituted by hierarchical actors such as the United States, China, Brazil, and the EU.
Our evaluation of legal means of control is less hopeful, given the instability of the legal
domain and the tendency for legal practices to seek to justify potential offensive actions
rather than seeking to limit harms.
Given the need to limit harms and violations, ethical perspectives are critical in the
cyber domain. The Just War perspective gives us some method of guidance proposing
that actions that seek to harm civilians and are not proportional to the violation should
be condemned (see Chapter 17). This is the crux of the cyber security debate; there is no
separation between civilian space and military targets in cyberspace. Pure military tar-
gets are myth: even Stuxnet, an operation directed at a facility in the middle of a desert,
was repurposed by non-​originating actors.
Due to the importance of the cyber domain to research, education, business, and
social interactions, actions in the domain bring great risks but also great possibilities.
Anything depended on brings vulnerability, yet vulnerability will not lead to harm in
all cases. It can be the path to mutually assured stability, given the importance of digi-
tal connectivity. Our cyber futures might not be filled with conflict and violence; as the
line between stability and chaos is always in danger of being exploited in cyberspace, the
observation that cooperation dominates, despite examples to the contrary, should be
reassuring to some extent.

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 ­c hapter 21

The Ethics and “ Re a l i sm”

of Nonviolen t Ac t i on

Mary Elizabeth King

Forms of protest and political pressure now classified as nonviolent action—​for

example boycotts, civil disobedience, fasting, public processions, rent refusal, strikes,
and vigils—​have been documented in numerous historical periods and varying cultural
and social contexts. A recurring, arguably universal phenomenon, nonviolent struggle
has occurred under all forms of social and political systems. No type of regime or gov-
ernment is invulnerable to the challenges of what is increasingly called civil resistance.
As an active method or technique used by civilians for achieving social and political
change, while intentionally abstaining from direct physical force, military tactics, or the
threat of violence, it can hold potential for benefiting both parties to a conflict, because
it does not achieve its goals by wounding or harming the adversary, except in a political
sense. Nonviolent struggles sometimes alter the relationships involved in the underly-
ing dispute; transformation of a conflict is one possible outcome, especially as actual
resolution of conflicts is rare and elusive.
Contemporary nonviolent campaigns have better odds for transforming authoritar-
ian domination than in the past, partly because of increasing diffusion of power centres
in society and the ability of mass media to bring global attention to localized campaigns.
These often occur in asymmetrical conflicts, where the power balance is lopsided (see
Chapter 18).
Although nonviolent action has been associated with pacifism, and pacifists have
long used the technique, pacifism is not a prerequisite. It has also been used effectively
by adherents of nonviolent philosophies and principles. It can best be understood as a
means of collective action used by people who are struggling for rights, seeking justice
or an end to oppression, or a change in government, and who adopt nonviolent resist-
ance as an effective strategy. Their choice is either because remaining nonviolent will
have the most persuasive force and can mobilize a wide range of resisters, or because
resort to armed violence is perceived as dangerous against a heavily armed opponent. As
nonviolent action lacks inherent political ideology, individuals may view themselves as
274   Mary Elizabeth King

realists, take stands based on philosophical idealism, or be motivated by personal ethics,

faiths, or beliefs, but equally are acting from pragmatism.
Nonviolent resistance functions outside prevailing institutionalized processes of
politics, its campaigns tending to materialize when established political bodies have
thwarted or refused to redress injustice, infringements, or denial of rights. This is espe-
cially true in a democratic or semi-​democratic context. In other instances, resisters may
be seeking support within parliaments or sections of government. Civil disobedience
may carry protest or refusal to obey into the law courts.
The technique is also studied under contentious politics, which includes a continuum
of action from violent to nonviolent. Some predominantly nonviolent movements
involve borderline use of physical force, for example in occupying buildings. In large
movements, nonviolent discipline can be difficult to maintain over time. Significant use
of force can undermine the resistance strategy.
Today’s campaigns challenge a widespread view of structural or state-​centred agency
in determining political change, partly in their recognition of the function of autono-
mous human agency. Yet nonviolent struggles can fail, as in Burma (1988) and China
(1989), leading to massive crackdowns in both countries. Although often ignored or
underrated in political theory and international relations, civil resistance is centrally
concerned with the origins of power.

Concept of Civil Resistance

Leo Tolstoy’s perception of a link between an ethical stance of nonviolence and the tech-
nique of nonviolent action was exceptional at the time. In quoting Éstienne de la Boétie,
who hypothesized in 1552 that any form of rule, no matter how tyrannical, is dependent
on popular consent and could be withdrawn (Boétie 1552), Tolstoy influenced Gandhi’s
comprehension of noncooperation, which is central to the theory and practice of civil
resistance.
Dismayed by the term “passive resistance” favoured by English speakers, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi in 1906 in South Africa devised satyagraha, denoting a relentless
search for Truth and implying the end or aim, roughly meaning “nonviolent resistance.”
Most terminology in the English-​speaking world was coined by Gandhi—​including
“civil resistance,” “nonviolence” (used by scholars concerning beliefs rather than
action), “nonviolent conflict,” “nonviolent sanctions,” and “nonviolent transformation
of conflict.”
Gandhi also systematized an alternative to armed insurrections in South Africa
(1896–​1914), partly by studying newspapers from Bengal, China, England, Ireland,
and Africa. Citing the 1905 Russian Revolution to fellow Indians to show that not even
the czar could force people to work if they refused to cooperate, he directly challenged
presuppositions about the origins of state power. In 1905 he writes, “even the most
powerful cannot rule without the co-​operation of the ruled” (Gandhi 1905: 8). He thus
 Ethics and “Realism” of Nonviolent Action    275

differentiated a grasp of power and consent theory that has become central for successor
movements worldwide.
At Gandhi’s behest, in 1920 the Indian National Congress party adopted noncoop-
eration as its policy for realizing independence. He sought unity on a noncooperation
programme: “I admit at once that there is ‘a doubtful proportion of full believers’ in my
‘theory of non-​violence’ [ . . . ] [F]‌or my movement I do not at all need believers in the
theory of non-​violence, full or imperfect. It is enough if people carry out the rules of
non-​violent action” (Gandhi 1957 [1944]: 138).
While profoundly believing in the necessity for human beings to avoid violence in
managing what he regarded as an unavoidable human condition of conflict, he believed
cowardice to be more abominable than violence—​if the only action an individual could
take against injustice was violent. This was because the basic choice for Gandhi was
action versus inaction, for the reason that failure to act is unlikely to bring change (Mary
King 2015: 247). Stressing appeals to the targeted group and seeking results through
“conversion” (in hopes that the adversary would accept the nonviolent protagonists’
viewpoint), Gandhi’s voluminous works reveal both contradictions and his pondering
of compelling justice through the pressure of public opinion. His national all-​India civil
disobedience movements in 1920–​2, 1930–​4 (excepting portions of 1931), and in 1940–​2
involved tangible disruption and obstruction.
Of the weaknesses in Gandhi’s standpoint, the most misguided was his belief that if
satyagraha failed it was because its practitioners had been insufficiently disciplined,
even when social realities had prevailed. His notion that the self-​suffering of the non-
violent challengers would “melt even the stoniest heart” is a dangerous tenet (Mary King
2015: 297). Conversion is rarely achieved. Disproportionate emphasis on it could result
in accepting appalling circumstances because the opponent has not yet been converted.
Martin Luther King, Jr cannot be comprehended apart from his intellectual jour-
ney in studying Gandhian civil resistance. Moreover, the movements in the southern
United States between the 1955–​6 Montgomery bus boycott and passage of the 1965
Voting Rights Act manifested Gandhi’s theories on nonviolent discipline, moral legit-
imacy, openness with authorities, pursuit of consequential social justice, and self-​reli-
ance. Sudarshan Kapur shows how four decades of 12,000-​mile voyages undertaken to
India (1919–​55) by African American leaders, some of whom met with Gandhi, gener-
ated transactional sharing of knowledge (Kapur 1992). Avidly covered in black-​owned
US newspapers, these interactions are characteristic of a pattern in which movements
learn from other mobilizations. Upon their return, the travellers brought to black-​led
and other institutions selected Gandhian theories that held promise.
King would not travel to India until 1959, but with the start of the Montgomery boy-
cott he became the individual most responsible for interpreting the Gandhian repertoire
and persuading black Americans of its efficacy, which was not a foregone conclusion.
Lessons were imparted in nocturnal mass meetings in black churches, which also delib-
erated strategy and prepared for reprisals. King shows ethical-​cum-​strategic compre-
hension, as did Gandhi. His authority in interpreting “foreign” material for the biblical
ethos of Southern black communities derived from the cultural and faith reserves that
276   Mary Elizabeth King

for three centuries had resided in black churches, beyond white control. Interpreting
Gandhi’s ideas into New Testament language familiar to his audience (and a wider
American public), he made remote concepts fit accustomed values.
King’s study of Gandhi included a 1939 book War without Violence—​among the
few direct sources available to interpret the Indian struggles for Western readers—​
that passed by hand among African American leaders. It was written by Krishnalal
Shridharani, a Brahmin who walked with Gandhi on the 1930 Salt March, and later
completed doctoral studies at Columbia University. King often adopted its phraseology
verbatim, as in “The means should be the end in process and the ideal in the making”
(Shridharani 1962: 281). Shridharani was among a number of Indians who lectured in
the United States, bringing Gandhian theories directly into the consciousness of some
black communities.
King differs from Gandhi in his primary (though by no means sole) focus on using
nonviolent methods to change a repressive colonial system, whereas King sought rec-
ognition of constitutionally guaranteed rights for African Americans, including federal
intervention against vigilantes and terror groups. Thus King importantly contributes
to the strand of political theory that justifies coercive nonviolent action and civil dis-
obedience within a democracy, in the tradition from Thoreau to Rawls. King in 1958
credits Gandhi with reconciling his ministry with political action. “[I]‌n theological
school I thought the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed
revolt [ . . . ] Then I read [Gandhi, who] lifts love from individual relationships to the
place of social transformation” (King, in Mary King 2002: 211). Historically, King can be
criticized for his inability to translate approaches from the South to northern cities, to
address entrenched economic injustices.
Gene Sharp is the progenitor of nonviolent strategic action, sometimes considered
a sub-​field. His 1973 three-​volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (called the Politics,
or the Trilogy) is the most important theoretical analysis since Gandhi. His extensive
historical analysis and immersion in orthodox political and sociological theory estab-
lishes power as the basis of nonviolent resistance and a means of engagement in con-
flicts. The Politics signified a leap in the spread of knowledge on nonviolent struggle,
which achieves its political objectives by altering power configurations among groups
or persons. Sharp’s arrangement of 198 nonviolent methods into three fundamental
categories—​protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention—​
meant, because new methods continually develop, a virtually inexhaustible repertoire of
actions became accessible to exert specific forms of power, applying ascending pressure.
Persuaded that nonviolent action demands shrewder strategy and tactics than mili-
tary engagement, Sharp’s analysis of dynamics of struggle and ways to weaken the bul-
warks upholding an opponent’s powers builds upon mechanisms of change analysed
by theoretician-​practitioner George Lakey (Lakey 1968). Accepting the scarcity of
the first mechanism, conversion, Sharp identifies the second, accommodation, as most
commonly experienced, occurring with nearly all labour strikes. In the third mech-
anism, nonviolent coercion, with increasing compression from arranged methods and
large numbers of resisters permeating the social and political order, the adversary may
 Ethics and “Realism” of Nonviolent Action    277

remain in position but no longer control the situation—​unless the challengers agree.
Little happens without the resisters’ approval. When political defiance prompts col-
lapse of a governing power, with no one left to surrender, the resulting mechanism is
nonviolent disintegration, as in 2000 in Serbia, when Otpor! (Resistance!) left Slobodan
Milošević with merely enough power to resign (Sharp 2005: 45–​7).
Though definitively contrasting Gandhi and Sharp would be misleading, two geneal-
ogies may be nonetheless discerned. Sharp began with intensive study of Gandhi, and is
strongly committed to nonviolent action despite overwhelmingly pragmatic emphases,
especially in later works. A principled/​pragmatic dichotomy would be overly reduc-
tionist, yet to a degree has some validity because, unlike Gandhi and King, Sharp does
not base himself ultimately on religious principles. Differentiation between activist and
scholarly descents has some authenticity, albeit veering toward over-​simplification,
because Sharp advocates civil resistance in specific contexts and consultations with lead-
ers. Having set out to provide a systematic and academically sound theory, grounded
in history, and related to Western sociological and political theory, and although later
scholars of nonviolent struggle continue to depend on Gandhi, in academic studies
Sharp has become the main starting point.
Sharp’s six decades of scholarship illuminate the possibility that civil resistance might
over time substantially replace deadly conflict, if organized for specific purposes and
practised with study, preparation, and strategic analysis. Weighing civil resistance as an
alternative to armed force, while maintaining the validity of policing and defence, Adam
Roberts acknowledges “progressive substitution” as an option and identifies Sharp as
having done most to develop this tradition of political thought into comprehensible the-
ory, “giving it a high degree of credibility, because he combined it with an analysis of
political power, including that of dictatorial and totalitarian regimes” (Roberts 2009: 9).
Sharp’s most significant contribution to international political theory may thus be his
illumination of nonviolent sanctions as having potential for incrementally substituting
for violent struggle.

Power Politics and Nonviolent

Struggle

While sufficiently efficient repression can crush a campaign, portions of the military and
security services have also defected and changed sides, as happened in Iran in December
1978. During the last phase of the Iranian Revolution, the clamour for the Shah to go
was such that members of the military sympathized with the nonviolent demonstra-
tors, refused orders, fired on officers, and deserted (Abrahamian 2009: 173–​5). The 1987
Palestinian intifada produced the 1991 Madrid international peace talks, where for the
first time since the 1948 war Israeli and Palestinian negotiators convened, although they
failed to secure a recognized homeland for the Palestinians.
278   Mary Elizabeth King

Credible assessment of civil resistance needs to evaluate the role of other elements
of power, including legitimate functions of armed force in human society, recognizing
the variability of interactions between traditional forms of power and that of nonviolent
movements. While not equivalent to or an alternative for the armed forces, it is import-
ant to recognize intricate relationships between power politics and nonviolent struggle.
Political realism identifies international relations with power politics, proposing that
states are self-​interested and (by some interpretations) aggressive in taking action, regu-
lating perhaps all state action, and where the end need not be congruent with the means
(see Chapter 48). Theoreticians of civil resistance generally argue that the means tend to
determine the end result achieved—​hence the importance of maintaining nonviolent
discipline.
In Eastern Europe and the Baltic states during the 1980s and 1990s, arguments for
fighting without violence were made on both ethical and practical grounds, as revealed
in immense outpourings of forbidden samizdat (Russian for “self-​ published,” as
opposed to state-​published). Often typed on onion-​skin paper onto ten carbon cop-
ies, samizdat circulated the ideas that led to the national nonviolent revolutions of the
former Eastern bloc. Academicians, authors, artists, clergy, journalists, scientists, and
scholar organizers brought a civil society into being in their imaginations and writings.
With coldly pragmatic reasoning, they viewed any violence as giving pretexts for sup-
pression by the Soviet-​backed communist party states. As disclosed in samizdat, untold
committees and popular fronts wanted to use ethical means in order to stand in contrast
to the ruthlessness and duplicity of the systems under which they had survived (Mary
King 2009).
Writing in 1978, playwright turned Czech President Václav Havel alludes to a para-
dox: the dissident movements of the Soviet bloc “do not shy away from the idea of vio-
lent political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because
it does not seem radical enough” (Havel 1989: 93). With communist party states ready
to employ armed force to preserve stability, Eastern Europeans sought a practical way
to avoid what happened in leaps toward freedom that were crushed in East Germany
(1953), Hungary (1956), and Prague (1968). In 1977, Charter 77 appeared, openly signed
by 243 citizens, including its progenitor, Havel, calling for the Czechoslovakian regime
to honour all international agreements, including the Helsinki Accords, that it (and
the Soviet Union) had agreed to uphold in 1975. The theory underlying Havel’s “liv-
ing in Truth” speaks to those who regard themselves as powerless under totalitarian-
ism, asserting that they possess a form of power and can act upon it. Rather than living
within a lie—​mutely functioning while surrounded by corruption, injustice, and official
falsehoods, and reinforcing unjust structures through their silence—​they can refuse to
cooperate with oppressive systems and speak Truth. His theory became the leitmotif for
what would be called the Velvet Revolution and for other nonviolent revolutions in the
Eastern bloc, as civil resistance became a definable factor in ending communist rule in a
number of countries in 1989–​91 and thus the Cold War.
Anti-​utopian stances of political realism have elements compatible with civil resist-
ance, including concern for possibilities of regression. Rather than favouring utopian
 Ethics and “Realism” of Nonviolent Action    279

thinking, nonviolent theoreticians tend to assume that political conflict cannot be

eradicated. Gandhi perceived solutions as likely to last until they unravelled again.
King’s own purchase on “realism” led him in 1966 to say that “for practical as well as
moral reasons, nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people. Anyone
leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the
possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-​armed, wealthy major-
ity with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black popula-
tion” (King 1986: 55).
A major contemporary political theoretician swaying analysts of civil resistance is
Hannah Arendt, whose discriminations of power, authority, and violence are influential.
She views power not as command and obedience, where the few coerce the many, but
occurring when people willingly come together to take action on common purposes.
Challenging a conception of power as domination, enacted with violence as its strong-
est force and the arbiter of politics, she views power as the capacity to act with cooper-
ation (see Chapter 15). “Force” should thus be reserved to speak of the energies exerted
by social movements. Authority, like legitimacy, manifests itself in obedience without
persuasion or compulsion. With violence characterized by use of instruments, violence
and power cannot be equated: “Power and violence are opposites; where one rules abso-
lutely, the other is absent. [. . . it] is incorrect to think of the opposite of violence as non-
violence, and to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy
power; it is incapable of creating it” (Arendt 1969: 56). She points to Denmark’s nonco-
operation with the Nazis, resulting in the October 1943 night-​time ferrying of most of
the nation’s Jews to Sweden, as representing “the enormous power potential inherent in
nonviolent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of
violence” (Arendt 1994: 171).
Some nonviolent protagonists have been invigorated in their political thinking
by thirty-​three prison notebooks, penned by the twentieth-​century Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci. Written during eleven years spent in Mussolini’s fascist prisons, the
notebooks are open to debatable interpretations from ambiguities meant to elude cen-
sors. Gramsci’s appeal lies in his suggestions that consent mainly pertains to civil soci-
ety, which he views both as an arena where ideological hegemony would consolidate in
the interests of the ruling classes and, importantly, where oppositional intellectuals and
social groups could articulate new ideas and develop organizational forms including
popular democratic struggles. Gramsci’s concept of egemonia (hegemony) sees intellec-
tual and moral leadership as exercised mainly in civil society. After Israel’s 1967 military
occupation of the remaining lands allocated for the Palestinians by the UN, Palestinian
activist intellectuals who questioned the persisting confidence in armed struggle found
Gramsci’s analyses potentiating. Contributing to the 1987 intifada, they absorbed his
view that rather than seizing power with violence, power should be built through organ-
izing independent groups in civil society, which can then leverage empowerment into
office (Mary King 2007: 103). Gramsci defines intellectuals as those whose purpose is to
“organize, administer, educate, or lead others” (Gramsci 2000: 340), evoking the skilled,
disciplined organizer scholars who populate contemporary nonviolent struggles.
280   Mary Elizabeth King

Indeed, civil society is usually the domain from which civil resistance emerges—​where
dispersed, self-​governing, freestanding centres of power can build networks that also
help to withstand reprisals.

Civil Resistance under Ruthless

Antagonists

Skeptics ask whether civil resistance can achieve designated goals when facing utterly
brutal opponents. Yet disciplined resisters using nonviolent methods in the face of
retaliations can create an asymmetrical conflict situation that may benefit them, the
“paradox of repression,” sometimes leading to greater mobilization. On rare occa-
sions nonviolent protagonists can delegitimize adversaries who have responded with
harsh reprisals, through dynamics called “political jiu-​jitsu” and “backfire.” In the first
instance, as nonviolent challengers reject reciprocation of their adversary’s violence,
within the opponents’ ranks the sight of unarmed people refusing to respond to aggres-
sion can cause security troops to refuse to obey orders, or to defect towards the nonvio-
lent group (Sharp 2005: 47; Mary King 2002: xv–​xvii). In the second dynamic, backfire,
events perceived to be unjust can generate public outrage against those seen as respon-
sible (Hess and Martin 2006: 249–​67).
Civil resistance can be harder to quell than guerrilla warfare. Captain Sir Basil Liddell
Hart interrogated German generals after the Second World War, seeking their evidence
on different types of resistance they had encountered in Nazi-​occupied countries. They
confirmed that “violent forms of resistance had not been very effective and troublesome
to them,” while nonviolent resistance as practised in Denmark, Holland, and Norway,
and to a lesser extent France and Belgium, showed effectiveness. “Other forms of resist-
ance baffled them—​and all the more in proportion as the methods were subtle and con-
cealed.” Liddell Hart notes: “It was a relief to them when resistance became violent, and
when nonviolent forms were mixed with guerrilla action, thus making it easier to com-
bine drastic suppressive action against both at the same time” (1968: 205).
Resistance of some kind is almost always possible, even under highly repressive
regimes, although it may need concealment, for example as with samizdat, memorial-
izing “calendar events,” changing street names, destroying road signs, and symbolically
laying wreaths. Writing about the Latin American military regimes of Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, and Uruguay that spread collective fear and systematically used state terror to dis-
mantle civil institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, Manuel Antonio Garretón distinguishes
between the phases of military bellicosity, when resisters concentrate on physical sur-
vival and perhaps make links to international figures and institutions, and later stages,
when greater organization, marshalling of resources, and mobilizing against terror and
disappearances are possible (Garretón 1992: 13–​23). After decades of killings by guer-
rillas and paramilitaries in Colombia’s counterinsurgency war, during the 1970s–​90s
 Ethics and “Realism” of Nonviolent Action    281

dozens of autonomous self-​governing peace communities were run by peasant civilians.

Using noncooperation and disruption against state and non-​state repressive actors, they
blockaded paramilitaries from advancing (Masullo Jiménez 2015).
Can nonviolent strategies counter violent extremism and be effective against warlord-
ism or fanatical Islamic revivalist foes? Possibly the highest risk from violent retaliation
against such perpetrators of horrific acts is that any resort to large-​scale violence in the
public space marginalizes a potential role for civilian populations that have a capability
for civilian defence, and upon whom both tyrants and occupiers ultimately rely for their
own sustenance and legitimacy. Although any proposed strategies could be criticized
as ineffectual, the alternative—​armed military campaigns—​has according to Maciej
Bartkowski fared worse historically than its nonviolent counterpart in the record of dis-
lodging cruel regimes and reducing the costs endured by populations, or in building
(and rebuilding) political and socioeconomic environments after brute conflicts have
ended. Bartkowski’s suggestions for strategies against guerrillas include transnational
assistance, but generally can be enacted by local people. Containment allows fanatical
leaders to rule, eventually revealing lost legitimacy in the eyes of inhabitants. Grassroots
noncooperation with hidden or unseen acts of both subtle and overt disobedience can
produce slowdowns, inefficiencies, and underground solidarity networks. Permanent
protest migration can be effected by residents who do not wish to join extremists or
an armed opposition, but also do not intend to remain in situ accepting exploitation
(Bartkowski 2016).

Ends and Means: Does Civil Resistance

Promote Democratic Outcomes?

Movements of nonviolent resistance have been historically generative in the creation,

extension, and defence of democracy, since the late eighteenth century playing a key
role in the progress from monarchy to democracy in the West. Once democratic forms
of government have been established, methods such as civil disobedience, draft or tax
resistance, mass rallies, and strikes have continuing roles in opposing domestic injustice
and unjust wars. Such actions can be condemned as posing potential threats to demo-
cratically elected governments, yet Michael Randle argues, in examining connections
between popular empowerment and democratic values, “that does not mean it has no
place at all in a democratic state”; it depends on the type of civil disobedience and “the
circumstances in which it is being used” (Randle 1994: 181). Another context in which
nonviolent sanctions promote democracy is in semi-​authoritarian regimes that allow
some degree of opposition and hold regular elections, even while using intimidation
and fraud to ensure that no challenger wins. Since 1986, when such tactics were used in
the Philippines, coining the term “people power” and resulting in the subsequent oust-
ing of Marcos, “electoral revolutions” have increased, including in former Soviet states.
282   Mary Elizabeth King

April Carter argues that “the focus on demanding a fair electoral process and respect
for constitutional norms, as well as on replacing authoritarian governments by oppos-
ition parties, is more congruent with nonviolent than violent methods of popular resist-
ance” (Carter 2012: 176). The most dramatic way in which mass nonviolent action has
been used to introduce democracy is through the collapsing of dictatorships, military
regimes, or repressive one-​party states, as happened in many nation-​states in Latin
America and Asia during the 1970s–​80s, and in the eastern European and Baltic states
in 1989–​91. These “velvet revolutions,” adopting the term noted with Havel, were almost
entirely nonviolent (the exception being Romania), and resulted in new democratic
constitutions and multiparty democracies.
Quantitative research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan shows nonviolent cam-
paigns succeeding more than twice as often as armed struggles when seeking to remove
presiding national leaders or achieve territorial independence, even in repressive non-​
democracies. In studying 323 nonviolent and violent movements between 1900 and
2006, they found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 per cent of the time versus 26
per cent for violent insurrections. They conclude that “moral, physical, informational
and commitment barriers to participation are much lower for nonviolent resistance
than for violent insurgency,” mainly attributable to movements’ abilities to recruit sig-
nificantly larger numbers of participants than armed insurrections, with nonviolent
campaigns on average four times larger than violent struggles or guerrilla warfare—​and
hence more instrumental in modifying power within an adversary regime. Although
they found that state repression and structural factors can reduce a civil resistance cam-
paign’s prospects for success by nearly 35 per cent, they discerned no structural condi-
tions determinative of movement outcomes. They showed that countries experiencing
popular nonviolent struggles are more likely to emerge from acute conflicts as demo-
cratic and as sustaining human rights and democracy, once established, compared to
violent insurgencies: “On the whole, nonviolent resistance campaigns are more effective
in getting results and, once they have succeeded, more likely to establish democratic
regimes with a lower probability of relapse into civil war” (Chenoweth and Stephan
2011: 10, 68, 10).
Even so, the 2010–​12 Arab Awakening starkly reminds that as a corrective for fail-
ing political systems, civil resistance is not a replacement for constitutional democracy.
Nonviolent campaigns initially helped to disintegrate authoritarian governments in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, yet these collapsed autocracies resulted in catastro-
phes: regression to authoritarian rule in Egypt, multiple wars in Syria, anarchy in Libya
and Yemen, and counter-​revolution aided by Saudi intervention in Bahrain.
The first of the Arab nonviolent revolutions, Tunisia in December 2010, experienced
the greatest socio-​political change and least bloodshed. Yet as social-​media reports
from Tunisia sped throughout the Arab world, they could not in their brevity reveal
the preparedness of Tunisian civil society organizations or An-​Nahda, an Islamist polit-
ical party that unlike others in the region had democratic maturity. Imitator movements
materialized in the contagion of Arab rebellion, without apprehending the decades-​long
Tunisian trajectory that had (however imperfectly) allowed civil society associations,
 Ethics and “Realism” of Nonviolent Action    283

labour unions, multi-​party politics, and women’s and human rights to develop. After
the autocrat’s departure, An-​Nahda exemplified the essential democratic prerequisite
of political parties in accepting electoral results. Defeated in 2014 legislative elections,
it conceded. Only Tunisia had civil society organizations relatively resilient enough to
ensure that its beleaguered new democracy would survive repeated challenges, as recog-
nized by the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a quartet of four such groups. Elsewhere,
along with fragile civil societies went limited preconditions and planning for achievable
goals, lack of a designated strategy group, and a lack of preparation for overhauling pre-​
existing governing bodies so as to redeem the purposes of the popular enlistment. As
most of the Arab campaigns experienced reassertions of autocracies, failures in delib-
eration and planning for the new order also revealed themselves, along with negligible
transnational support for the new democracies.
The protagonists of the Arab Awakening faced two particular obstructions: cruel
repression by the targeted regimes, and deficiencies of conditions and institutional cap-
acitation for peaceful transitions to pluralistic constitutional governance. The tragic
outcomes reopen a long-​standing debate on methods versus conditions, in which the
literature of civil resistance emphasizes the significance of skill with nonviolent meth-
ods. A clarifying difference between the nonviolent revolutions of the former Eastern
bloc and those of the Arab world is that the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Baltic
states retained residual memories of their own constitutional democracies from before
the Second World War. Also, by the late 1980s, as the Iron Curtain weakened, Eastern
Europeans gained awareness of Western democracies, as Radio Free Europe offered
opposition leaders and pro-​democracy commentators airtime. Civil resistance can
disintegrate a regime, but without critical prerequisites and specific planning (even if
underground) it may have great difficulty in guiding the formidable generative task of
building new political institutions and constitutional protections.
Nonviolent campaigns thus share with realists a concern for the development or
reform of institutions. As William A. Galston puts it, “institutions provide arenas within
which abstract concepts of principles and aims [ . . . ] are worked up into concrete con-
ceptions”; they “help define the community’s purposes, rather than simply putting prior
understandings into effect” (Galston 2010: 393). Nonviolent struggles can hold pre-​
existing institutions to the purposes of the mobilization—​rather than merely handing
over authority to them. An area for future focus is how to build institutions for the future
that reflect a cogent understanding of the popular quest, and to do so while still deeply
engaged, before other immediate aims have been achieved.

Conclusion

For civil resistance to be developed competently and strategically in the future so that it
can function in ways hitherto served by armed forces, its proficiency must enlarge. This
would mean extending capacity and applicability, and replacing reliance on defence
284   Mary Elizabeth King

contingents gradually and for targeted purposes, so that a viable substitute can reduce
reliance on armed services as a reasonable alternative.
New forms of violent insurgencies should be expected in the future; whatever the
merits of nonviolent action, it cannot remove violence. Yet militarized civil conflicts
no longer represent the principal choice for groups unable to redress wrongs through
standard politics. Civil resistance, rather than armed insurrections, has become the pre-
ferred form of self-​reliant political action, even though regimes and adversaries are in
some cases outmanoeuvring nonviolent campaigns. The centrality of noncooperation—​
with related dynamics including defections, political jiu-​jitsu, and backfire—​will remain
crucial for planners of nonviolent campaigns.
In 1958, Commander Sir Stephen King-​Hall observed differences in the acceptance
of military occupation by populations: “in the past [ . . . ] if a state were invaded and
occupied, this event marked the end of the war,” with no option apart from capitula-
tion to “annexation of the conquered territory.” He discerned a new factor in which the
“so-​called civilian population may not be disposed to accept the defeat” (King-​Hall
1958: 181). His perception predictively augurs widening applications for civil resistance,
as groups and societies increasingly refuse to accept forms of oppression tolerated in
the past, while simultaneously rejecting violence as their means of action. Increasingly,
interactions of the historic technique of nonviolent action with realist politics will
enhance the ability of average people to fight effectively on democratization, the envir-
onment, gender equity, human rights, institutional reform, and the eradication of new
attempts at subjugation.

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 Pa rt V

H UM A N I TA R IA N I SM
A N D H UM A N R IG H T S
 ­c hapter 22

Hum anitaria ni sm
and Hum an Ri g h ts

Michael N. Barnett

A chapter on human rights and humanitarianism in a volume on International Political

Theory could go in one of two directions. One possibility would be to discuss what
unites them, emphasizing how these two projects share a discourse of humanity, his-
torical origins, and a cosmopolitan purpose. In the contemporary period, human rights
and humanitarianism are increasingly working the same ground, especially evident in
the area of international law (see Chapter 5). Historically, international humanitarian
law governed conduct of states and non-​state actors during periods of armed conflict,
and international human rights law governed the conduct of states vis-​à-​vis their citi-
zens. Over the last two decades, though, these two bodies of law have merged to cre-
ate a “humanity’s law” (Teitel 2011). The other possibility would be a consideration of
what divides them, highlighting how their superficial similarities mask some significant
differences. Human rights and humanitarianism practice reflect very different kinds of
cosmopolitan politics and purposes. As remarked by the president of the ICRC:

In theory we all share the same aspirations for global peace, development and secur-
ity, as well as the understanding about the limits of humanitarian action in address-
ing or preventing the causes of crisis. In practice however, our experience shows that
emergency access to vulnerable populations in some of the most contested areas
depends on the ability to isolate humanitarian goals from other transformative goals,
be they economic, political, social or human rights related. (Maurer 2014)

Whether we choose to emphasize areas of convergence or divergence depends on more

than taste—​it also depends on how we choose to define each concept. There are, stylis-
tically, two ways to try and attempt to mark the boundaries of a concept. One is to iden-
tify its “essence,” that is, distinguish the characteristics that make it a particular “kind.”
In this exercise, the challenge is to agree on a definition, and then use that definition to
code an event or action as an instance of human rights or humanitarianism. As we will
290   Michael N. Barnett

soon see, it is on this basis that many narratives of human rights and humanitarian-
ism often construct their histories, beginning with a stipulated definition to harvest the
past that can produce a coherent story that links the past to the present. A contrasting
approach begins not with some objective, outsider’s definition but rather with how these
concepts are given meaning and practised in a particular historical context. These con-
cepts are social constructions. If we want to know what human rights and humanitar-
ianism are, and whether and how they differ, then we must understand their meanings
and practices in their historical context. In contrast to the first approach, this interpre-
tivist perspective allows for the possibility that human rights and humanitarianism can
change with the times, with the distance between them possibly widening, narrowing,
or merging. Our epistemological leanings will shape how we define each concept, on
what grounds we find points of distinction, and whether we see more convergence or
divergence. Choices have to be made.
This chapter adopts an interpretivist approach to offer a provisional map of the dif-
ferences between human rights and humanitarianism in the contemporary period. It
opens by briefly examining the case for their similarity, focusing on the shared discourse
of humanity and historical origins. Notwithstanding these common orientations, each
field of study and practice constructs strikingly different histories, showcasing differ-
ent turning points, identity-​defining events, and narratives. These alternative narratives,
I will suggest, reveal that while on the surface humanitarianism and human rights are
joined by humanity and activated by suffering, the former is constituted by an ethics of
death and the latter by an ethics of life. In the post-​Cold War period these philosophical
differences are evident in, and arguably produced by, their different practices—​that is,
what it means to do human rights and humanitarianism. These doings, I want to further
suggest, are connected to different kinds of principles, politics, and techniques. The con-
clusion uses these points of contrast to revisit the presumption that they have a shared
politics of humanity, highlighting how human rights and humanitarianism have distinct
relationships to sovereignty, global suffering, and the global politics of life and death.

Humanity and History

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the claim that human rights and humanitar-
ianism are birds of a feather is their shared discourse and historical heritage. Both claim
to be constituted by “humanity.” Although humanity has no consensus meaning, most
available definitions refer to the belief that all individuals are equal, have equal moral
worth, and are entitled to live a dignified life (IFRC n.d.). In stark contrast to various
ideologies that often preach differences, such as nationalism and tribalism, humanity
compels us to transcend our particularistic identities and see ourselves as connected to
all others, near and far (Feldman and Ticktin 2010).
Humanitarianism and human rights also share a cosmopolitan commitment (Appiah
2010; Waldron 2000). The cosmopolitan transcends particularism, invites us to see
 Humanitarianism and Human Rights    291

ourselves as connected to all others, near and far, nurtures a moral vision from the self to
the other, and, in doing so, creates a healthy distance from our own culture and achieves
a more complex and complete human experience (Hollinger 1985: 59; see Chapter 5).
Cosmopolitanism is not just about a particular sensibility; it also is about a kind of polit-
ics. A cosmopolitan ethos demands that our choices incorporate how they affect others,
which entails both negative and positive duties. It obligates us to avoid taking action
that produces unnecessary and foreseeable harm. It also obligates us to try and prevent
human suffering, create the possibility for human empowerment, and nurture human
solidarity. There is a chasm between the world that exists and the world that cosmo-
politans hope exists. They believe, however, that humans have the potential to live their
ideals—​and that part of a cosmopolitan politics is to bring this world into existence. At
the very least, they must try.
This last comment regarding the gap between the normative and the empirical points
to the importance of history. For many in the humanitarian and human rights worlds,
the discourse of humanity is a metaphysical conviction, a matter of faith that requires
no evidence. Yet it was not until the late eighteenth century that discourses of human-
ity first appeared, transnational movements emerged to reduce suffering of others in
distant lands, and compassion became institutionalized in various laws, norms, and
organizations. This burst of humanity is due to changes in economy, technology, society,
politics, culture, and religion. The Enlightenment emphasized the importance of indi-
vidual autonomy, liberty, and reason for human fulfilment and flourishing. The econ-
omy was increasingly being organized around market principles. Changes in technology
were making it possible to travel over greater distances in shorter periods, bringing once
isolated communities into contact and expanding commercial relations. The American
and French Revolutions led to the celebration of the “rights of man” and the demand for
a state that was representative of and accountable to its citizens. Cultural trends in lit-
erature, art, and music were bringing more attention to the individual and the common
person as a subject of concern. Religious reforms, including but not limited to various
“awakenings,” led to experiments that emphasized the individual’s conscience and inter-
pretation of text and tradition, and demanded new forms of social action that would
help to make heaven on earth. All these changes widened the moral imagination.
These revolutionary changes helped to make compassion a defining element of
humanity. Although compassion certainly existed before the eighteenth century, it
became perhaps the surest outward expression of one’s humanity (Linklater 2011;
Haskell 1985; Hunt 2007; Laqueur 2009; Barnett 2011). As Hannah Arendt (2006: 70–​1)
observed:

History tells us that it is by no means a matter of course for the spectacle of mis-
ery to move men to pity [ . . . ] Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth cen-
tury, when this age-​old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words
of Rousseau, an “innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer” had become
common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made
the French revolution.
292   Michael N. Barnett

To be human was not enough to claim one’s humanity. Nor was it enough to demand
that others recognize one’s humanity. Instead, to be human meant demonstrating one’s
capacity to be humane and to show compassion to those who are in need.
Although popular texts of human rights and humanitarianism frequently open by
discussing these shared philosophical commitments and historical origins, the sub-
stance of their histories quickly proceeds down separate paths, drawing different inter-
pretations and significance from the same events, identifying different moments of
transformation, telling the story through different kinds of objects, and embedding
these accounts in different broad narratives. Human rights narratives have several
defining characteristics (see Chapter 23). First, they largely concern the expanding rec-
ognition of the sanctity, dignity, and autonomy of the individual in relationship to the
state and other sources of discrimination, intolerance, oppression, and violence. These
are not only claims about what all individuals are entitled to by virtue of being human,
but also accounts of the evolution and institutionalization of those claims (Lauren 1998;
Hunt 2007; Moyn 2010; Hopgood 2013; Schmitz and Sikkink 2002: 517). Second, these
stories often have domestic and international dimensions. The domestic dimension
formed around the “rights of man” heralded by the American and French Revolutions,
and the broad institutionalization of basic rights, freedoms, and liberties in domestic
constitutions and cultures. A historic breakthrough occured when human rights went
global. Precisely when this occurred is a matter of dispute in the historiography—​with
some citing the First World War and the establishment of international minorities treat-
ies and refugee law; others cited the Second World War and the creation of the UN and
the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR); and others the late 1960s
and early 1970s with the beginnings of a vibrant network of human rights organiza-
tions, the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and the creation of a raft of conventions, laws, and
agreements that prohibited everything from racial discrimination to torture. Third,
there is considerable attention to texts, and especially to legal documents. It is all well
and good to defend this or that right on principled, moral, or religious grounds, but the
emphasis on law in the human rights community means a certain reverence and defer-
ence for legal discourse for determing whether there is a right and whether it has been
violated. Human rights is a matter of law, and law requires the written word. Fourth,
there is a Whiggish sensibility to many of these accounts, often using these expanding
rights and accumulating texts as measures of human progress (though less so than in
the past). Indeed, because so much of human rights history treats the creation of legal
texts as another victory for the angels, the counter-​histories of human rights tend to
embed them in powerfully corrupting forces, including imperialism, capitalism, gov-
ernmentality, and institutional interests (Cmeil 2012; Hopgood 2013; Moyn 2010; see
Chapter 46).
Although histories of humanitarianism often refer to the same historical source
material, they differ in several ways (Barnett 2011; Overseas Development Institute
2015). They are not about expanding rights and claims that individuals can make on the
state and others, but rather about the expanding architecture whose purpose is to save
lives at risk. Moreover, unlike human rights, which has domestic and global dimensions,
 Humanitarianism and Human Rights    293

stories of humanitarianism focus exclusively on the international. And, in contrast the

text-​driven character of human rights narratives, humanitarian narratives tend to be
event-​driven and to focus on the principled actors and discursive forces that increas-
ingly challenge people and states to do the right thing. An important break occurs
with the Battle of Solferino of 1863 and the subsequent creation of the International
Committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions. The creation of the ICRC,
in fact, is often the starting point for many histories of humanitarianism; significantly,
this moment is relatively neglected in human rights narratives. With the creation of the
ICRC, histories of humanitarianism now split into two subplots. There are accounts
that focus on the development of international humanitarian law and the growing pro-
tections afforded soldiers and, increasingly, civilians. And there are accounts that aim
to protect vulnerable and marginalized populations as a consequence of natural and
humanly made disasters; Biafra, Cambodia, Sudan, Vietnam, and a string of post-​Cold
War events in countries including Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan
form the skeleton of this account. There are branches of humanitarianism that want to
save not just lives, but also souls and societies, which often brings them into the terrain
of other movements that seek social transformation and justice. Lastly, in contrast to the
utopian narratives of human rights, humanitarianism has a dystopian view.

Distinctions with a Difference?

Human rights and humanitarianism are distinguished not only by different histor-
ical narratives but also by their doings. “Doing” human rights often means something
quite different from “doing” humanitarianism. I offer this claim with a fervent caveat:
I am not embracing the essentialism that I criticized earlier. The differences between
the two, to the extent that they exist, are produced not by genetics but by history. The
doings of human rights and humanitarianism can change over time, driven by struc-
tures, strategies, actions, and reflections. Consequently, whether and how human rights
and humanitarian differ can only be assessed in historical context, and this discussion is
limited to the post-​Cold War period.
This emphasis on doings owes an obvious debt to the literature on practices, and
scholars of human rights and humanitarianism have already employed this literature
for their analysis of each community (Redfield 2013; Beitz 2011; Karp 2013). There is no
agreement on what it means to study practices, or which direction to rotate when doing
the practice turn. For my purposes, the definition by Adler and Pouliot (2011: 6) works
reasonably well: “socially meaningful patterns of action which, in being performed more
or less competently, act out and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse
in and on the material world.” I use the elements of this definition to compare human
rights and humanitarian practice in the contemporary period. Specifically, I focus on
the purpose as defined by the problems to be addressed, and, in turn, how these chal-
lenges inform the principles, politics, and techniques of each. These doings help inform
294   Michael N. Barnett

the meaning of each activity, which I discuss in the conclusion. Furthermore, these
elements are defined by and help to constitute those involved in these activities as a
“community of practice” (Adler and Pouliot 2011: 16), a like-​minded group of actors that
jointly creates and sustains shared practices that are the benchmarks for determining
“best practices” and a framework for collective learning. The boundaries between one
community and another are rarely settled; indeed, I opened this chapter by acknowledg-
ing their potential convergence. One of the dangers of assuming that the boundaries are
properly surveyed and settled is that it not only overlooks the border politics but also
reifies differences between human rights and humanitarianism.

Problems to Be Solved

Human rights and humanitarianism are designed to solve different kinds of prob-
lems and thus have different ambitions or purposes. Human rights practice concerns
the articulation, codification, and enforcement of those rights that individuals possess
because of their humanity, with the goal of helping individuals live a life that is full and
flourishing. What are these rights? The various taxonomies and lists have grown big-
ger and longer over the decades. There are first-​generation, second-​, third-​, and fourth-​
generation rights. There are political, civil, cultural, economic, social, and gender
rights. Some rights are defined as more basic than others. There are rights of prisoners,
minorities, refugees, women, children, the disabled, the aged, and other categories of
people. There are negative rights—​those that keep others from interfering in your
life and decisions—​and there are positive rights—​those that hasten human flourish-
ing. Because of all these different rights, the human rights community can resemble a
circus—​there is a centre ring, outer rings, and then sideshows outside the big tent.
Humanitarianism largely concerns the attempt to assist distant strangers whose lives
are in immediate danger. Humanitarianism, in short, is about saving lives in extremis.
In emergencies, action is urgent and time lost means lives lost. These emergencies can
occur because of either natural or human activities. One of the first major acts of inter-
national humanitarianism came in response to the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755. More
recent “acts of God” include the tsunami of 2005 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
Humans also have been every bit as destructive as nature, with war and violence often
at the root of mass suffering. In any event, humanitarians attempt to provide for the
immediate needs of those in danger. Lists of needs are not that long, typically including
food, shelter, medicine, water and sanitation, and clothing. Sometimes humanitarian
agencies, especially those that are faith-​based, insist that humans need more than bread
to survive, and talk about feeding the soul, but largely they restrict their “to do” list to a
limited number of material interventions. Although humanitarians respond to emer-
gencies, when rates of morbidity and mortality escalate, there is always the temptation
to address other forms of suffering, and sometimes with the hope that it is possible to not
just reduce the suffering but address the very causes (Barnett 2011). At such moments,
 Humanitarianism and Human Rights    295

the meaning of humanitarianism spills into development, peace-​building, democracy

promotion, and human rights.
In order to address the problems and apply solutions, aid and rights workers orient
themselves toward quite different locales. Human rights tends to be practised in capitals
and international cities where political power resides, laws are passed and enforced, and
debate takes place. It is possible to practise human rights without ever actually meeting
individuals who have had their rights violated. To be sure, human rights workers often
go to the field to collect information and stories that are required for their arguments,
but they take these stories back to the sites of power with the hope of creating policy
and legal change (Armstrong 2008). Humanitarianism, on the other hand, cannot be
practised remotely. It requires proximity to the victims. Most obviously, feeding tubes
cannot be fixed, nutrition bars distributed, rates of malnutrition assessed, drinking
water and cooking gas provided, or disease combatted if aid workers cannot get access
to the populations in need. The emphasis on proximity has not just a practical but also
an ethical dimension. For many aid agencies, and especially those like Doctors without
Borders, their ethical commitments and authority is based on being eyewitnesses: it is
by being next to vulnerable populations that they can demonstrate their commitment to
the victims of the world and can speak on their behalf. In any event, the different kinds
of doings of human rights and humanitarianism take place in different locations and
bring each community into contact with very different populations.

Principles

These different doings are connected to different sets of principles. The International
Committee of the Red Cross’s Jean Pictet (1979) identified seven core principles:
humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and univer-
sality. The first four principles, though, arguably constitute the core. Humanity com-
mands attention to all people. Impartiality requires that assistance be based on need
and not discriminate on the basis of nationality, race, religion, gender, or political opin-
ion. Neutrality demands refraining from taking part in hostilities or from any action
that either benefits or disadvantages the parties to the conflict. Independence requires
that assistance should not be connected to any of the parties directly involved in armed
conflicts or who have a stake in the outcome; accordingly, there is a general rule that
agencies—​especially those that are involved in the conflict—​should either refuse gov-
ernment funding or limit their reliance on it.
Principles of humanitarianism can be either constitutive or instrumental (Barnett
and Weiss 2008). For some, these principles are nearly sacrosanct. To be a humanitar-
ian requires honouring these principles. Anyone can give aid, but only those who fol-
low these principles are card-​carrying humanitarians. These principles also serve as
functional guidelines because by adhering to them agencies can better provide relief
and protection. If aid agencies are perceived by combatants as partial, allied with the
296   Michael N. Barnett

opposing side, or as having a vested interest in the outcome, then they will have a dif-
ficult time getting access, or even worse, become targets. These principles, if followed
and respected, create “humanitarian space” that provides a sanctuary for aid workers
and victims. These principles and this space can be relatively easily achieved in natural
disasters; at such moments, states and populations generally welcome such assistance,
and the major obstacles are destroyed ports, roads, airports, and communication links.
However, they can be particularly demanding in human-​created emergencies: vulner-
able populations are made vulnerable by one of the combatants for political and stra-
tegic advantage; combatants are often suspicious that such assistance might advance
the rival party; and combatants and other opportunists will attempt to skim off the top
before letting a convoy go through its checkpoints. In general, discussions of humani-
tarian principles often concern the how of action, and these principles are often judged
in relationship to the effectiveness for relieving suffering.
Most discussions of human rights principles are about fundamental values that are
possessed by individuals because of their humanity. In other words, rights and principles
are nearly interchangeable. Moreover, the human rights world has a very different view
of the principles that are cherished by humanitarians (Leebaw 2007). Independence,
neutrality, and impartiality are critical to humanitarianism because of their function
in gaining access to populations in immediate need, but these principles are not nearly
as relevant, and sometimes irrelevant, for rights-​oriented organizations. When rights
organizations imagine independence, they typically think of reflecting universal values
and not state interests or cultural groupings. However, they are often willing to align
with states if doing so helps the cause of rights and justice. For instance, human rights
organizations have been much more inclined toward humanitarian intervention than
have been humanitarian organizations. Neutrality makes little sense to human rights
activism. This is a world in which there are those who have their rights violated and
those who violate them, victims need protection and violators deserve punishment, and
the accomplishment of protection or punishment produces measures of justice. The
human rights world also has its own version of impartiality. For them, impartiality is
determined in relationship to human rights principles and documents that are treated
as having a universal status. Amnesty International’s claim to impartiality, for instance,
“reflects the premise that the expansion of international human rights law is transform-
ing human rights norms from a set of political aspirations into a body of impartial legal
norms” (Leebaw 2007: 226). Whereas the humanitarian world conceives impartiality
as partly a strategy to achieve its goal of gaining access to all those in need, the human
rights world conceives of impartiality as a strategy to portray a stance of “distance or dis-
interest needed to discriminate between victims and perpetrator” (p. 227).
Proportionality is another principle that is viewed differently by the two commu-
nities. Humanitarianism is about limiting unnecessary suffering, not eliminating it.
In the context of war, it accepts that suffering is a matter of course. If humanitarians
were intent on eliminating all wartime suffering, then they would direct their energies
at ending war; humanitarians, though, are not pacifists but pragmatists. International
Humanitarian Law (IHL), the body of law that ICRC defends and advances, does not
 Humanitarianism and Human Rights    297

have a zero tolerance policy regarding civilian suffering; instead, it demands that such
risks be judged proportionally in relationship to military necessity (Gardam 2004). In
other words, collateral damage is lawful. Human rights organizations, in contrast, often
treat any civilian suffering as almost, by definition, disproportionate and illegal because
it violates a fundamental right to life. Proportionality, in the human rights world, can be
evaluated by examining the number of civilian to combatant deaths. In the humanitar-
ian world, such figures only become meaningful once the circumstances under which
civilians were killed or injured are known.

Politics

Human rights and humanitarianism also differ in their relationship to politics. Both
present themselves as apolitical, but have very different understandings of what that
means. Human rights actors base their claim of being apolitical on the grounds that
rights derive from universal principles which, because of their universality, are apolit-
ical. Yet to expand and defend human rights requires embracing politics, a willingness
to speak truth to power, a readiness to confront the state and others who are accused of
violating human rights and expected to protect them. The purpose of such action is to
protect and defend the individual in society, and sometimes that means not just making
sure that there is compliance with the law but also changing the law itself. In this regard,
human rights organizations see themselves as activists working for social change and
justice. There is no way around politics.
Humanitarian organizations also present themselves as apolitical. Keeping people
alive is not practising politics; instead, it is practising humanity. Humanitarian actors
acknowledge that their interventions will have political effects, but humanitarianism,
unlike human rights, does not have a political or partisan agenda. They want to keep
people alive, period. If aid workers are seen as being overtly or intentionally political
they will lose access to those in need, and potentially become viewed as a party to war
and thus a legitimate target (Barnett and Weiss 2011). Consequently, most practitioners
of humanitarianism treat politics as either a moral pollutant or a dangerous flirtation.
It is because they want to remain as pure as possible that aid agencies often avoid activ-
ities that are frequently treated as part of politics, including human rights, development,
democracy promotion, and peace-​building.

Competent Activities

Human rights and humanitarianism can be done better or worse; be more or less effect-
ive; operate with greater or lesser efficiency; and correspond to, or fall short of, “best
practices” as defined by the community of practice, and with the goal of saving lives
298   Michael N. Barnett

in the case of humanitarianism and defending against human rights violations and
advancing human flourishing in the case of human rights. Three factors help to illumin-
ate, define, and create differences between human rights and humanitarianism: where
each learns its trade; the stylized tactics each adopts; and the kinds of justifications and
reasons connected to the activities.
The doings of human rights and humanitarianism are learned in different places. A
principal function of a community of practice is to transmit knowledge, that is, to teach
its members how to practise the craft at its best. Human rights practice can be learned
in any of number of places, including in the field and through grassroots activism and
volunteerism, but increasingly it is taught in law schools and in other legalized settings.
All roads lead to law. Because human rights are defined by legal texts and precedents,
violations are defined by violations of law, and defence of human rights is frequently
achieved by passing new laws or pressuring compliance with existing ones, knowledge
of law is central to human rights. Training takes place not only in the growing number of
courses but also in the clinics located in law schools. As Hugo Slim (2015: 17) observes,
“human rights has developed a very specific practice that deploys investigation, expos-
ure, and confrontation to identify and rectify violations of people’s human rights. This
is the practice of the courtroom taken directly to the war zone.” Humanitarian train-
ing, on the other hand, tends to occur in professional schools, most notably in med-
ical and public health, and in the field, with the one notable exception of the role of law
schools in the training of international humanitarian law. The field of humanitarianism,
in this respect, is dominated by specific technical occupations—​these are doctors with-
out borders, engineers without borders, sanitation experts without borders, logisticians
without borders, and on and on. Lawyers without borders tend to work in human rights
agencies.
Human rights and humanitarianism are also associated with different kinds of tac-
tics. As activists, those in the human rights community are generally mobilized to pro-
mote social change and justice, which is best achieved through the changing of policy
and, ideally, law. What happens when actors fail to comply with these societally held
expectations and legal commitments? The human rights community often responds by
naming and shaming the violator. The underlying presumption is that actors care about
their reputation for compliance with normative and legal expectations, and worry about
the consequences, reputational and otherwise, if they are named as being in breach.
Such naming is nothing short of an act of shaming. Although shaming could be done
in private and behind the scenes, the human rights community generally proceeds as if
naming and shaming is best done in public. Once named and shamed, the theory goes,
violators will feel the need to clean up their act, or at least give the appearance of doing
so or explain their perceived violation. In contrast, humanitarian practice involves
“humanitarian diplomacy” (Magone Neumann, and Weissman 2012). As a matter of
diplomacy, humanitarians operate with a “much less adversarial focus on assessment,
appeal, and negotiation” (Slim 2015: 17). This is not because they see no evil, but rather
because naming the evil they see will not necessarily help them save lives at immediate
risk. They operate in a world, in short, where shaking hands with the devil is the price
 Humanitarianism and Human Rights    299

to be paid for saving lives—​and devils often do not care about their reputation with law-​
abiding citizens. Humanitarianism will have more success working privately, quietly,
and without judgement than broadcasting their concerns and accusations.
Lastly, “human rights” and “humanitarian practice” frequently refer to different justi-
ficatory discourses. Both appeal to the transcendental claims and duties that are not sus-
ceptible to empirical evidence but rather are taken as a matter of faith and conviction.
Yet for human rights, legal discourse is increasingly used to justify aspects of human
rights (Buchanan 2013; Beitz 2011). Humanitarian reasoning tends to be based on a mix-
ture of law, moral duties, and technocratic capacity. Law plays a heavy role in the regu-
lation of wartime conduct. Yet when humanitarians make appeals to help the suffering
and the victims of war, they refer to moral duties and sentiments, which Fassin (2012: 1)
defines as “emotions that direct our attention to the suffering of others and make us want
to remedy them.” Humans do not need a law to tell them that they have a duty to miti-
gate unnecessary suffering and death.

Global Politics of Life and Death

The boundaries between human rights and humanitarianism are constantly being set-
tled and unsettled, made and remade, pulled apart and pushed together, and this whirl-
wind of motion often means that attempts to find clear lines that distinguish them are
either futile or foolish. Yet my practice-​influenced analysis of humanitarianism and
human rights suggests that they are situated differently in relationship to International
Political Theory in several ways. By way of conclusion, I want to speculate how they dif-
fer in the relationship to sovereignty, our obligations to suffering strangers, and the eth-
ics of life and death.
Humanitarianism and human rights have different relationships to sovereignty
(Shapcott 2010). Sovereignty in international politics is broadly defined as a set of rules
that recognize the state as the highest authority in international affairs and codifies the
principle of non-​interference. Both human rights and humanitarianism are often por-
trayed as posing an equal challenge to state sovereignty on the grounds that each derives
from a view that humanity, and not location, should shape our duties and obligations.
This is probably truer of human rights than humanitarianism. Humanitarianism claims
that our moral duties have no territorial borders and that our primary goal is to help
those in need; and, according to the principle of impartiality, priority should go to those
who are most in need. Considerations of who is most deserving of attention should be
based on an objective calculation of who is suffering the most, and not on the basis
of religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality, or some other discriminating marker. Yet it
has accommodated itself to the states system and represents no prima facie challenge
to the authority of the state. According to the historian J. F. Hutchinson (1997), state
interests imprinted the basic architecture and reach of the ICRC, to the point that it was
accused by some of its founders of helping to legitimate war and protect the system of
300   Michael N. Barnett

states. Humanitarian organizations want access to those at risk; and while they might
need to shoot their way through from time to time, for principled and pragmatic rea-
sons they prefer to achieve access with the consent of the parties. Sometimes this can
mean patiently waiting to get consent, and giving legitimacy to otherwise unsavoury
states and non-​state actors, but that is an acceptable price for keeping people alive.
Contemporary international human rights, on the other hand, challenges state sover-
eignty in several ways. It operates in the language of universal rights, with the implica-
tion that the state’s domestic authority has limits. And while they are still rather rare, a
growing number of enforcement mechanisms operate at the international level that are
intended to punish those state actors and other individuals that violate basic human
rights standards.
These differences between human rights and humanitarianism can be seen in the
reception given by each to the idea of humanitarian intervention and a responsibility
to protect (see Chapter 25). The idea of a responsibility to protect made many humani-
tarian organizations uneasy for various reasons. Some objected to the use of force, not
in principle but rather in the belief that the use of force might lead to more lives lost
than saved. For instance, some within Doctors without Borders insist that once Somalia
became an armed intervention, then access to the victims of famine became even more
constrained and dangerous. Others worried that because only states could end a geno-
cide or mass atrocities, this would mean that they would have to align themselves with
states, which might entangle them with state interests and leave them open to manipula-
tion and an inversion of their principles. Several aid agencies have speculated that when
they backed the intervention in Kosovo in 1999 they eventually abandoned the prin-
ciple of impartial relief (as they ceased providing aid in Serbia) and became another
member of the NATO coalition. Human rights organizations, on the other hand, have
been enthusiastic in their support for humanitarian intervention and a responsibility to
protect. And they also insist that it is not enough to end the suffering: the international
community also must “rebuild” in ways that mitigate the possibility of a return of mass
atrocities.
Human rights and humanitarianism share a relationship to a humanity constituted by
suffering, but they are motivated by different kinds of suffering. Suffering is an endur-
ing feature of human history, but it became a social problem, recognized as a source of
concern and reason for action and intervention, beginning in the late eighteenth cen-
tury because of the emergence of the notion of “humanity.” The Enlightenment helped
to produce the revolutionary belief that all individuals are equal, but the recognition of
each other’s equality does not necessarily translate into a concern for each other’s wel-
fare. Instead, it was the suffering of others, and the belief that one could and should do
something about it, that helped to transform individuals into “men of feelings” (Crane
1934: 206–​7; also see Festa 2010). The process of recognizing the humanity of others as
a consequence of their suffering, moreover, often implicates one’s own humanity. It was
not enough to be human—​humans also needed to be humane. To be humane required
demonstrating one’s humanity, exhibiting sentiment and compassion, and helping
those experiencing unnecessary suffering (Arendt 2006; Haskell 1985; Festa 2010).
 Humanitarianism and Human Rights    301

Conversely, neglect, indifference, or causing unnecessary suffering became a mark of

one’s inhumanity. Humanity is parasitic on suffering.
But there is a surfeit of suffering in the world, and, as a practical matter, not all suffer-
ing will matter equally to others, will have the same social significance, or will generate
identical meaning. Students of human rights and humanitarianism are not interested
in personal suffering—​the sort of suffering that comes as a result of internal dynamics
or a personal crisis. Instead, they are interested in social suffering, the kind of suffering
caused or conditioned by society (Wilkinson 2013). But not all social suffering is the
same, either, and human rights and humanitarianism are motivated by different kinds
of social suffering. Humanitarianism is attentive to suffering caused by a lack of life-​
sustaining material systems that threaten “bare life” (Agamben 1998). Human rights, on
the other hand, is concerned with suffering that not only violates human entitlements
and rights but also stunts human flourishing.
These different kinds of suffering, furthermore, make different kinds of demands on
us and lead to different kinds of ethical projects. Human rights and humanitarianism
share a commitment to a humanity that is motivated by suffering, but by different kinds
of suffering. Humanitarianism is concerned with that suffering that represents a threat
to basic human life. Human rights, on the other hand, become activated when the possi-
bility of flourishing and living a fulfilling life is stifled or stunted. Humanitarianism and
human rights, accordingly, demand different kinds of interventions. Humanitarianism
demands that we give to those in need—​that is, we express feelings of charity and ben-
evolence. I give to suffering others not because they are “entitled” and I “owe” them,
but rather because of my generosity. Human rights, on the other hand, demands that
we intervene to end violations and punish violators. By tackling these violations, rights
agencies are attempting to make the world right and whole; the goal is empowerment,
justice, and prosperity. Incited by different kinds of suffering, the two movements also
contain different visions of an ethics of life and death. Human rights operates with a
vision of a world that imagines the opportunity for all humans to achieve their aspir-
ation as they define them. This is, in short, not just a politics of humanity as defined in
maximalist terms, but also a politics of life. Humanitarianism also is activated by suf-
fering, but suffering that concerns not the possibility of human flourishing but rather of
human dying. It is not a utopian but rather a dystopian politics. It operates with a moral
minimalism. It refuses to entertain discussions about what the living do, and what it
means to live a full life. Humanitarianism represent the “last stand” of humanity, and it
is death that creates its ethical ground. Humanity is created in the heavens and in hell.

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 ­c hapter 23

Hum an Ri g h ts i n
the Real Worl d

Stephen Hopgood

It is fair to say that human rights have come to dominate international efforts at pre-
venting significant harms to vulnerable people and populations, and are now increas-
ingly prominent in campaigns for more positive social goods like equality and a
sustainable environment. Human rights really began to make ground in the 1970s
(Hopgood 2006; Moyn 2010; Keys 2014), as more organized forms of leftist politics col-
lapsed and the stagnating welfare state came under siege from the neoliberal drive for
enhanced profits and new markets (Klein 2007; Marks 2013; also Moyn 2015). But real
lift-​off for human rights we can date specifically to the years 1991–​3. During this brief
period, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, confirming US primacy in the international
system, UN Secretary-​General Boutros Ghali launched his sovereignty-​curtailing
“Agenda for Peace,” and the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights formally
upheld the universality of rights and created the post of UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights.
Since that time we have seen an explosion in human rights law, institutions, and dis-
course that would have been unthinkable during the dark decades of the Cold War.
The world’s most recalcitrant regimes, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, are today subject to
demands they face accountability for their crimes at the International Criminal Court
(ICC) or intervention under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the name of human
rights (see Chapter 25). There are efforts under way to create a Convention on Crimes
Against Humanity (Sadat 2014) and a World Human Rights Court (Scheinin 2009; also
Alston 2014). International and national rights-​based NGOs have tens of millions of
supporters and receive hundreds of millions of dollars in income annually. This is truly
“the age of rights” (Henkin 1990).
This positive account is an entirely credible description of human rights in the real
world: they are high-​profile, inspirational, embedded, legitimate, and (it is claimed)
effective (Simmons 2009; Sikkink 2011; Brysk 2013 Becker 2012; Fariss 2014). And yet,
if the availability hypothesis says researchers tend to overvalue data which are close
 Human Rights in the Real World    305

at hand, human rights suffer from what we might call the ubiquity hypothesis. Rights
are everywhere, and because they are everywhere we assume they must be doing some
good, having some impact, changing the world. Not only have some critics begun to
doubt this, asking how effective human rights really are (Hopgood 2013; Posner 2014),
evidence has shown an increase in pushback against rights globally (Freedom House
2015; Cooley 2015), coupled with a growing awareness of problems within the human
rights movement. Most obviously, rights can clash with each other, they can hamper
other forms of organization, illiberal causes can be championed in pro-​rights terms, and
human rights suffer from a profound political weakness when it comes to what gives
normative agendas their power. Furthermore, the human rights movement itself seems
to replicate some wider inequalities (see Chapter 49).
These problems have been obscured because the states most supportive of human
rights are the very same states that have until recently dominated international insti-
tutions. In a world of multipolarity, that pre-​eminent position is no longer assured
(Hopgood 2013). Hope for human rights will not necessarily disappear with it. After all,
such states are already spectacularly hypocritical (Farrell and Finnemore 2013). What
will go, I suggest, is the narrow conception of what those rights are, and the possibility of
shrugging off questions about what gives those rights their normative force by pointing
to international law as a way to foreclose substantive moral conversation. This strategy
only makes real sense in a secular and cosmopolitan context where liberal norms about
personal autonomy, and individuals’ right to choose, are axiomatic and already law. That
world, of advancing secularism and declining nationalism, has gone (if, in truth, it ever
existed).
The first two sections of this chapter will outline some of the problems faced by
human rights in the real world, while the third section looks at what the shift toward a
more post-​Western world might mean for the future of human rights.

Structural Problems with Rights

Human rights face a wide range of problems in the contemporary world. Some of these
arise inevitably from the clash between normative visions, others from some specific
weaknesses of human rights as a moral paradigm. Of this latter set of difficulties, I will
assess three: foundations, qualification, and personhood. Each of these has its impact
in the real world, as we shall see. Once we have examined these we’ll look at the myr-
iad range of empirical—​that is to say, contingent and political—​problems human rights
encounter on a daily basis.
What gives human rights their moral authority? What are their foundations? We
could answer “the law,” but then we are forced to ask what gives that law, natural or posi-
tive, its authority. God? The assent of states? God was once an answer, centuries ago,
although which God was a question over which millions fought and died. Reason?
Nature? Versions of these have replaced God as the answer while keeping much of the
306   Stephen Hopgood

natural law legacy. But these answers are equally contested, and do not escape the same
challenge: what gives them their superior authority once we have competing views
about the right answer to any moral question? Indeed, what makes God right? A legal
theorist like Hans Kelsen simply stipulated a “basic law” or grand norm, an “unmoved
mover,” a point of origin that cannot be questioned.
But what happens when it is questioned, when the consensus (of the Universal
Declaration, for example) is challenged? Then it’s “turtles all the way down” (Brown
1994)—​that is, there is no bedrock, one foundational claim rests on another then
another, ad infinitum. Political philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls
have tried in different ways to provide answers to questions of justice in a world with-
out transcendent foundations (by arguing that through different mechanisms reason-
able people would accept a shared conception of justice about basic public institutions)
(see Chapter 6). What happens, however, when that shared conception cannot be forged
because there is a deep disagreement about the source of normative values? Even inter-
national human rights lawyers might have to accept that there is no definitive answer to
the question “What makes law binding as law?” (Kennedy 2016: 156).
Other responses in our era have been more empirical than philosophical or legal.
One response is to point to cultures going back centuries and show they possessed
human rights-​like concepts (Ishay 2008; Reus-​Smit 2013). This human rights “trad-
ition” is constructed by its proponents in the face of evidence of the atrocities humans
have committed against each other and of the lack of an unambiguous use of the words
“human rights.” Another approach argues that there is something about human beings
that endows us all with equal moral claims. The best current candidate is “dignity,” a
version of the natural rights argument. This, too, quickly runs into problems. Dignity,
like most of the concepts in this area (freedom, equality, justice, human, right), is an
essentially contested concept (Gallie 1956): an agreed definition of what constitutes the
concept’s appropriate use is lacking. Dignity can just as easily be defined as something
to be protected in, for example, an innocent child or an unmarried sister, creating a
paternalistic reason for action at odds with the whole thrust of children’s and women’s
rights.
As is clear, the drafters of the Universal Declaration avoided this problem by ham-
mering out a lowest common denominator agreement: the thirty articles cover a wide
array of rights, and include a get-​out clause for states in the presence of threats (that they
define) to public order. Drafters explicitly avoided asking how they had all managed to
agree (Cohen 2004). This approach, to start from the fact of agreement, without founda-
tions, actually makes sense, as Charles Beitz has argued. Natural rights claims fall apart
quickly, while institutional and political rights, agreements states have reached to give
their own and other citizens certain rights, avoid the need to ask foundational (i.e. “nat-
ural rights”) questions (Beitz 2003). But while this may sound promising, it is a political
liability when those institutions are not considered to be legitimate. At least “nature”
gives scope for answering the “why” question when faced with counter-​norms, whether
religious, nationalist, traditional, or ideological. Given their strong links with the cul-
ture of Western liberal societies, and their essential agnosticism, if not secularism,
 Human Rights in the Real World    307

human rights are a weak mobilizer in the face of more insistent and imperative demands
from identity, interest, or faith.
This is the second problem: qualification. One advantage of Beitz’s answer is that
the natural argument—​that we all have equal rights regardless of our identity and our
behaviour—​lacks plausibility. It may still be the great achievement of human rights
to have denaturalized discrimination. At least in public discourse, in many places it
is harder than it once was to openly stigmatize certain groups on account of their eth-
nic, racial, sexual, religious, or gender identity. The canonical statement of human
rights as natural rights goes something like: these are rights we all have simply by vir-
tue of being human. You need do nothing to qualify for them. Your virtues and actions
are irrelevant, as is your identity, to your having human rights. Racists, rapists, and
saints all have exactly the same entitlements, even if they would deny those rights to
others.
But this is an implausible account of morality. We see the persecution of “the other”
the world over. Much more plausible is an account that sees human rights as contin-
gent on being a member in good standing of a community. Those who are outsiders are
not considered to enjoy the same rights. And those on the inside who break core social
norms are often in some way punished, some even to the point of death, for contraven-
ing the very norms that give a community shape and collective reality. These rights are
substantive ethical benefits given to individuals not as individuals but as members. If
you break social boundaries, you need to pay a price to reacquire your status (i.e. your
rights). Some of these norms may be liberal and others illiberal. Most will involve deter-
ring crimes against the social body and regulating its membership. Whether in immi-
gration politics, e.g. in the US and Western and Eastern Europe, or the treatment of
certain social crimes like sex offences and drug trafficking, abstract rights clash with
the rights of citizens to specify membership and appropriate behaviour. Citizenship, not
humanity, bestows rights. Beitz’s rejection of natural rights, while seemingly a step for-
ward, actually opens up the space for different, coexisting answers to the question of
who qualifies for rights.
Beyond having rights, a further question arises: what does it mean to use them prop-
erly? This raises the issue of personhood. Human rights bearers are rational, autonomous
individuals capable of moral reasoning. Adapting the natural law account, the assump-
tion is implicit that, given choice, people will choose wisely (i.e. rationally). This concep-
tion of a person has been roundly critiqued by post-​structural scholars who argue that
the liberal subject necessary to exercise human rights is just as much a social construc-
tion as those rights themselves (there is no “natural person,” in other words). This led
Foucault, for example, to openly reject the subject of human rights (even as in his activ-
ism he increasingly saw the utility of rights claims: Golder 2015). More problematic than
this, however, is that the natural account smuggles a conception of “the good life” into
what constitutes personhood (Raz 2007: 6).
It is obvious, I assume, to a Western liberal that individuals should have the final say
over who they have sex with or if and whether they marry and reproduce. But what if
marrying for love, not advantage, has severe negative consequences for the family as
308   Stephen Hopgood

a whole? Bringing shame can lead to significant social harms. Many of these dynam-
ics are present in issues like arranged marriage and FGM. We see a strong sense in
anti-​FGM advocacy of “proper” womanhood—​young women who are independent,
empowered, with full control over their bodies and choices (Hopgood 2016). But within
many communities this would make little sense. A meaningful life is lived according
to social, cultural, and religious norms established over time. Sons and daughters are
part of the identity of their “family” and vice versa, and the interests that can be derived
from these identities are more collective than personal. Even subtle paternalism that
seeks to “nudge” girls and women into different life choices has a strong sense of free-
ing a “self-​actuating” person imprisoned by culture (Nussbaum 2001). When faced with
ethical collectives whose views are different, is it so obvious that human rights should
triumph when what they offer is a diminution in principle of parental and community
security and integrity, in the name of a culture whose lifestyles and consumables seem
to risk family breakdown, sexual promiscuity, environmental collapse, and widening
inequality?
We, the readers of this volume, might answer yes to this question. We might also
finesse problems of foundations and stress the priority of universal membership. Both
Beitz (2003) and Raz (2007) follow Rawls (1993) in coming up with a political account
of human rights. But prioritizing politics ignores the impact structural problems have
on human rights in the real world. Any admission of ambivalence about human rights
as transcendent normative demands (i.e. as a kind of truth) is a bad idea—​it emboldens
the opponents of rights who have no such qualms about their own project’s founda-
tions (in God, or the nation, or history, or tradition), and it erodes the faith of advocates
who, challenged by doubt, have only the thin gruel of icons and legal triumphs to fall
back on.
These structural problems—​why are rights right, who has them and why, and how
should they be exercised?—​are the cracks within which empirical problems fester and
grow. Human rights appear to be normative claims that evade the need for answers at
the level of a comprehensive morality. But this is only an illusion. We see this in conflicts
with religion, alternative lifestyles, cultural traditions, with renewed national and eth-
nic beliefs, with state power, with social attitudes to refugees, asylum, and immigration,
with environmental problems, and with the consequences of inequality. Comprehensive
moralities must have an answer to questions like: why this freedom, why this equality,
why this justice? The natural rights version of human rights claims is: whatever your
answer to these questions, you must respect human rights. But this assumes human
rights are not anchored in a comprehensive morality, that of liberalism. This is what’s
being challenged—​the liberal roots that anchor the human rights tree. Human rights
proponents are being asked: are you committed to a secular public sphere, the moral
primacy of the individual, to identity-​blind citizenship, to the derivate nature of group
and cultural rights, to the state as a servant of the people, to the entitlement of anyone to
choose their religion, gender, sexuality, community, marriage partner? In much if not
most of the world, this story isn’t going to win global human rights advocates the wider
social support they need to be effective.
 Human Rights in the Real World    309

Empirical Problems with Real Rights

Doubts have always existed about the degree of state compliance with human rights
obligations. Whether through reservations to international treaties (e.g. CEDAW), the
refusal to join major international agreements (great powers and the Rome Statute), or
simply the ongoing practice of things legally prohibited like torture, states have often
ignored their legal duties. Some scholars have pointed out that human rights are best
observed where they are least needed, i.e. in liberal societies (Hafner-​Burton 2013).
Others have argued that even where there might be a will, states sometimes lack the
infrastructural capacity to enforce human rights (Börzel and Risse 2013). The terrorist
attacks of 9/​11 moved the world quickly on from a decade of thinking about protect-
ing civilians and humanitarian military intervention, with Kosovo (dubbed “illegal but
legitimate”) as the high point (and Rwanda and Srebrenica as the low). Post 9/​11, even
Western states undermined civil liberties and, in the case of the United States, openly
practised torture in the name of counter-​terrorism. The fight with radical Islam has only
intensified. After the Paris attacks of November 2015, the French government imposed
a state of emergency and formally informed the Council of Europe it was derogating
from some of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. In
the fifteen years since 9/​11, almost all states have clawed back ground against human
rights. Freedom of expression and privacy have also taken major hits as surveillance has
become embedded in our lives.
Freedom House argued in 2015 that we had had nine consecutive years of a decline in
freedom worldwide, their report sub-​titled “Return to the Iron Fist” (Freedom House
2015). There are almost too many cases to choose from of states reverting to classic
methods of human rights repression (e.g. Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Hungary,
Uzbekistan). Presiding over them all are Russia and China. Russia has led the way in
innovating to staunch human rights, using the law, tax codes, NGO registration regu-
lations as well as intimidation and violence. China continues to actively crush dissent
whenever it breaks out, seemingly with the tacit connivance of its ever-​wealthier middle
class. Both also engage in what we might call “counter norming” (Cooley 2015), Russia
stressing “traditional values” (allied to the Russian Orthodox Church) and China “sov-
ereignty.” Other states, from India to Uganda, have used the “foreign threat” of rights
claims to justify a nationalist discourse that bolsters state power (Rao 2010).
Within the democracies of the West, there are vibrant constituencies of sceptics about
human rights on the right wing of the political spectrum (e.g. in the US, UK, Austria,
the Netherlands, and France), populist political parties that are critical of the impli-
cations of the rights revolution, especially in terms of immigration (e.g. Denmark,
Finland, Germany, and Sweden), or left-​wing critics of imperialism who see rights as
a component part of an American-​led neoliberal order. All of which is in addition to
religiously inspired pushback against rights (ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, evangel-
ical Christianity and charismatic Catholicism, Hindutva nationalism, Ultra-​Orthodox
310   Stephen Hopgood

Jewish zealots, Myanmar’s Buddhists, etc.). The adoption by ASEAN of a Human Rights
Charter is, argue human rights advocates, actually an effort to co-​opt the language of
rights while subverting their intent. In cases like “pinkwashing” (where pro-​Zionist
groups use LGBT rights to target Palestinian political claims) or the National Rifle
Association’s support of the right to bear arms, we even find rights being “weaponized”
(Bob 2012). The degree of hypocrisy Western states demonstrate (e.g. support for Saudi
Arabia), alongside the torture programme, drones, and extraordinary rendition, exacer-
bates the problem. When the world’s primary power, the United States, shifts norms in
the opposite direction to human rights, everyone else can choose to shift with it.
Then there are other, “internal” problems with rights that we can organize into four
groups: cultural rights, intersectionality, inequality, and mass mobilization.
Cultural rights take us straight to the personhood issue. I have already argued that
at the core of human rights is a conception of the person as a self-​contained, reason-
ing individual. Her interests ground her choices, and no one else—​except perhaps for
some life-​saving reasons of paternalism—​may legitimately interfere with those choices.
Such a picture will be familiar to any liberal. It follows that tolerating the veil, violence
against women, FGM, trans-​and homophobia, ethnic discrimination, to name only a
few harms, can never be justified. The best that might be tolerable is a brief and explicit
“state of exception” while fighting a greater threat. This thick liberalism challenges many
societies where the choices people make are neither individual nor autonomous: par-
ents choose for children and men choose for women.
It is unwise, to say the least, to approach all of these issues with the fiery rhetoric of
absolutist human rights. But in any number of these fields, a decision like that of the
French state to ban all visible symbols of religious affiliation in public office cuts dir-
ectly against people’s sincerely held religious commitments and (to anticipate the next
point) their religious rights. In a society with a secular public sphere which, I argue,
is the sine qua non of human rights, religion is a wholly private matter. But this is not
how the world works outside secularized Europe. In essence, when does a cultural or
religious rights defence become a human rights violation? Arguments for “vernacu-
larization” have been prominent in trying to explain how the abstract demands of glo-
bal human rights law can be “translated” into ideas and practices that resonate locally
(Merry 2009). But for human rights advocates, local practices must always be secondary
to universal norms. This doesn’t prevent transient pragmatic compromises. But there is
no doubt about the final end: autonomous life choices for all as individuals.
This leads us naturally to intersectionality, the claim that oppression operates along
several vectors simultaneously. People may be abused because of their gender, their race,
their religion, and their sexuality at one and the same time by social institutions that
leave them marginal on all measures. Failing to see this can lead to antagonisms within
the human rights movement, where race versus class, rather than race and class, is a for-
mulation used to deter collective action. What this disguises, however, are the very dif-
ferent ways in which one’s social and cultural location may undermine collective action.
An obvious case would be wealthy LGBT activists who stress non-​discrimination and
equal treatment but do not share in the demand for economic redistribution because
 Human Rights in the Real World    311

they already possess market power through their own resources. The same is true of
tensions within the women’s movement, revealing the very different social power of
some women compared with others. In addition, bringing together activists from dif-
ferent rights-​based movements has the perverse effect of uniting enemies. The collective
movement for sexual orientation and gender identity rights reflects an underlying nor-
mative alliance but also allows opposition groups (the Muslim Brotherhood, the Roman
Catholic Church) to make common cause.
A major fissure here is between civil and political rights on the one hand and eco-
nomic and social rights on the other. It is common for global human rights advocates to
stress the unity of the human rights movement (Neier 2012). But there is a deep tension
in terms of priorities for rights activism. Classic civil and political rights—​freedom of
expression, of movement, from physical and bodily harm, from discrimination—​are for
many a luxury when poverty and radical marginalization makes shelter, medical aid,
and getting enough to eat and drink the priority. Some civil and political rights advo-
cates don’t see social justice issues as properly human rights issues at all (though they
agree social justice matters). Part of the reasoning for this is the difficulty of campaign-
ing on economic and social rights (Roth 2004). But what if inequality is a greater threat
to the possibility of living a fully realized life than discrimination or non-​accountability?
After decades of neglect, concern has grown rapidly that inequality, the uneven
nature of wealth distribution, will lead to a loss of legitimacy within mature democracies
and possibly even social unrest. There has been an explosion of work on inequality, not
just on its scale (Piketty 2014) but also on its impact on the political process where the
wealthy few control the political outcomes of the many (Stiglitz 2012). Human rights,
with their priority emphasis on the law and on persuading states to comply with it, might
actually distract people from more effective forms of opposition that could yield greater
social change. In arguing this, it is impossible to ignore how symmetrical are the rise of
human rights and the advent of neoliberalism (but see Moyn 2015). The organized left
collapsed in the 1970s, the welfare state was retrenched, the state abdicated responsibil-
ity for employment and marketized core public services in areas as diverse as education,
health, and justice. Organizing via trade unions, political parties, or social movements
to restore some of those welfare services by raising the tax burden on the wealthiest
members of society might be another way to secure social change, one that the whole
idea of individual rights does not suit. The growing emphasis on economic and social
rights is, unsurprisingly, more prominent in poorer countries, as are more diverse and
more direct methods for demanding justice (like land occupation, for example). What’s
the best way to stop the Trans-​Pacific Partnership? Maybe via large-​scale collective dis-
sent (e.g. consumer boycotts) based on the idea of a fair distribution, rather than rights?
This brings us to a final group of issues for human rights in the real world to do with
mobilization. First, the political economy of the human rights movement is badly skewed
(making it unwise to talk of “the movement” at all). Funding comes mainly from profes-
sional middle-​class people in a familiar set of countries—​the industrial democracies—​
and some of it is spent in very poor countries. But this middle class is not necessarily
progressive on inequality, and the issues it is interested in (e.g. sex trafficking) may not
312   Stephen Hopgood

be priorities in many countries (where poverty may be the priority issue, or drugs). This
split is replicated in the urban elite/​rural split within many states. To preserve the glo-
bal human rights brand might mean highlighting issues that are not the most pressing
issues in any particular locale but may matter to rich donors in the West. Increasingly,
international NGOs also target an online, social media audience to raise funds and
awareness but these “clicktivists” may in reality be “slacktivists” (Gladwell 2010). The
ongoing mobilization needed to tackle deeply complex and contested social problems
through engaged longer-​term action is absent in these cases.

The Age of Multipolarity

These problems have been evident for a long time, so why have they come to the fore
now? The answer is relatively simple: a decline in Western power. Human rights have
performed an essential function in the foreign policies and rhetoric of liberal states,
essentially the EU, the United States, and other outposts of the world colonized by
Europeans. These societies observe rights because they are in some sense liberal soci-
eties, rather than being liberal societies because they observe rights. Their political and
social culture, influenced by Christianity, includes the idea of the autonomous individ-
ual, a secular public sphere, and the toleration of aspects of identity and faith in private.
These ideas were embedded after 1945 in international law and institutions up to and
including the ICC. This embedding persisted despite the epistemological and ethical
break that slowly evolved in the 1950s as established authorities in areas of knowledge
and morality were challenged. What had been orthodoxy, whether via a positivistic the-
ory of knowledge or because of the fixed nature of sexualities, genders, and identity, fell
apart. This loss of confidence has been papered over by human rights which, in their
natural rights version, have been treated as facts. At the same time, liberal states saw the
virtue of rights as a new weapon with which to discipline postcolonial and socialist soci-
eties that wouldn’t play the game by liberal rules. From 1991 to 2001, US hegemony made
this look like a permanent shift.
Today we live with the reality that the power of the West is receding. No doubt the US
will remain first among equals, and European states, whether together or in some suc-
cessor formation to the EU, will continue to be wealthy and influential. But as we can see
in Syria, Iraq, or Ukraine, the United States has lost control over its regional alliances.
When Russia and China are unified the US struggles to prevail. Iran, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, all are now active in various Middle East conflicts, with tension between Iran
and Saudi growing. American diplomacy lacks impact in this complex security environ-
ment where strong, heavily armed states now pursue policies it cannot shape.
The very different counter-​norm of sovereignty that China and Russia stress, whether
at the UN or against the EU in the Human Rights Council, is attractive to many states
who feel they have yielded too long to American and (more loosely) Western demands.
The possible collapse of the WTO or South Africa threatening to pull out of the ICC
 Human Rights in the Real World    313

are examples where Western power is being challenged. If we take an obvious secur-
ity issue, the South China Sea, we have Southeast Asian states interested in American
involvement to check Chinese expansionism, and we have an America interested in
such involvement. But what role is there for human rights in this space? How likely
is Washington to impose some form of rights conditionality on, say, Vietnam (or the
newly emboldened Philippines) except as bargaining leverage (Hafner-​Burton 2013)?
The same goes for Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
A world of multiple poles of different size is a world where diversity will grow, one
where a global consensus and a single regime of law and norms will be tough to sustain
(see Chapter 37). The costs of monitoring and policing are too high, the risk of counter-​
productiveness too great, the need for allies too insistent. Transnational human rights
advocacy will continue on a wide array of issues, and will make progress where political
interests align and funding and publicity can be sustained. But the days of international
institutional innovation are numbered, and the ICC will stand as a kind of mausoleum,
a testament to justice only in those rare moments when the great powers agree or don’t
care about what happens in The Hague.

Conclusion

All of the above is not to ignore the global successes of human rights nor those cases
where they have made a vital difference locally. In situ, human rights can be a potent
mobilizing force to resist the worst kinds of discrimination and oppression. Global
efforts have been key in diffusing the language and concepts of rights in this way. They
are a resource for all. But they are one way of seeing the moral universe, and one form
of ideological movement. We can support and cherish them where they make a differ-
ence, but we should not reify or venerate them where they find barren soil or clash with
alternative normative frames. And we should expect resistance, and must respect it. Not
from the murderers and torturers, most of whom are the object of dissent from their
own people already, but from those whose faith or belief, religious, ideological, trad-
itional, is not consistent with the liberal tenets of Western-​style modernity. In this battle,
human rights will not only fail, they might even prove counterproductive and risk some
of the very injustices, of coercion and discrimination, that they are ostensibly intended
to prevent (Hopgood 2013).
On balance, the liberal vision might well be a better way of life than that lived by
many—​more safe, more free from harm, more fulfilling. Liberal moral philosophers
have no problem saying that. But this self-​confidence is toxic in a human rights world
where there is such diversity, inequality, and difference. In the end, human rights may
simply become irrelevant where they cannot establish resonance with existing beliefs or
latch on to the interests of the middle class. Like mainline Protestantism in the United
States and Europe, they will decline as a faith where more exciting, direct, motivating,
and relevant faiths and social practices emerge to replace them, including vernacular
314   Stephen Hopgood

variants of human rights. Their churches may get bigger, their coffers fill, and their leg-
acy be burnished, but the role of human rights in terms of real-world impact is likely to
be severely truncated in the world to come.

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 ­c hapter 24

Hum anitaria n Ac tors

a nd Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Jennifer M. Welsh

For thinkers immersed in some of the long-​standing debates in international political

theory, the question of how well contemporary institutions “act out” their rights and
responsibilities in international society has always loomed in the background. Whether
theorists employ the mode of “reflective equilibrium,” adjusting their prescriptions to
take account of institutional possibilities and limits (Rawls 1999) or Buchanan’s more
particular form of “institutional moral reasoning,” evaluating normative arguments in
terms of their impact on the broader legal and institutional framework that underpins
international society (Buchanan 2007), the nature of real-​world international institu-
tions has frequently proven to be an inconvenient truth that must be grappled with.
This chapter takes the reverse approach: it focuses on a specific subset of the institu-
tional landscape, humanitarian actors, and examines the impact of attempts to privilege
a more “individualist,” or cosmopolitan, approach to the mitigation and regulation of
armed conflict. In so doing, it illustrates the ways in which normative values can come
into apparent conflict, and analyses some of the different means through which such
tensions could be and have been resolved.
Before proceeding, two parameters. First, while the humanitarian actors I treat here
are those working in situations of war, the temporal spectrum of armed conflict that
I employ is a broad one, including prevention, response, and rebuilding. Second, while
I engage with theorists who address the normative question of how humanitarian act-
ors should behave, this chapter is more centrally concerned with the dilemmas that arise
from “really existing” attempts to advance or implement norms related to human rights
in humanitarian work. As such, the chapter is neither a work of “appreciative theory”
(Slim 2015b), which views the strengthening of humanitarian norms and the global
expansion of humanitarian action as a significant moral achievement (particularly in
light of the humanitarian outcomes it has achieved), nor an example of “critical theory,”
 Humanitarian Actors and IPT    317

which emphasizes humanitarian action’s Western centre of gravity and its alleged pur-
suit of a neo-​colonial agenda (Fassin and Pandolfi 2013). Instead, the analysis is driven
by a concern with how the dilemmas encountered by humanitarian actors are under-
pinned by clashes between core values that have long animated debates in international
political theory.

Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and

the Individualization of War

As Michael Barnett suggests in Chapter 22 in this volume, humanitarianism and human

rights—​while sharing some common origins and ethical ambitions—​have important
differences at the levels of both philosophy and real-​world politics. Thus, while the lan-
guage is often common, the two “dialects” can sound distinct (Slim 2016). Human rights
constitute an expressly political project, aimed at promoting and protecting—​including,
if necessary, through forms of punishment—​the legal rights attached to the individual
qua human being, wherever he or she resides. Humanitarianism, on the other hand,
has been understood as the neutral, impartial, and independent provision of relief to
populations in particular settings and circumstances, most notably conflict and natural
disasters. The broader regime of international humanitarian law represents what schol-
ars and activists have referred to as an “ethic of restraint” (Slim 2015a), derived from the
more general moral imperative to limit suffering, based on a shared common humanity,
rather than the goal of addressing the causes of conflict or the conditions required to
create peace or justice.
Despite these important distinctions, and the not always healthy competition that
they have engendered between the human rights and humanitarian communities,
the past two decades of international discourse and practice have placed increasing
emphasis on the human rights vision, which centres upon a generic individual whose
rights must be respected, rather than a situated individual with a particular status (e.g.
combatant or non-​combatant), whose entitlements are conditional upon membership
in a collective. Indeed, the rights and responsibilities of the individual are at the centre of
today’s armed conflicts in a way that they have never been before, with profound impli-
cations for how wars are justified, waged, and regulated.
This process of “individualization,” which challenges the primacy of collective enti-
ties such as warring parties or sovereign states, has spawned new kinds of wars and
peacekeeping missions and a new class of international crimes (Teitel 2011; Kaldor
2006; Sikkink 2011; Blum 2014), thereby shaping the goals and operating principles of
intergovernmental and non-​governmental organizations that engage in humanitarian
action. It has also had a profound impact on the law of armed conflict, which is no longer
purely a body of reciprocal legal rules agreed to by sovereign states or conflicting par-
ties, to limit their conduct during war, in order to minimize the suffering of innocents.
318   Jennifer M. Welsh

Instead, those who become embroiled in armed conflict are still seen to possess their
core human rights, regardless of what the warring parties believe they need to do out of
“military necessity” (Verdirame 2008).
Two particular sets of humanitarian actors will be the focus of my discussion: the
United Nations and humanitarian NGOs. The individualization of war forces these act-
ors to confront the status of individuals in at least two different capacities: as subject to
violence but deserving of protection; and as agents who can be held accountable for the
perpetration of crimes committed in the course of conflict. As I will argue, the grow-
ing prioritization of individual protection and accountability challenges long-​standing
principles that have animated humanitarian action in the past, such as impartiality,
independence, and consent, and has given rise to a series of policy dilemmas for today’s
humanitarian actors.

The Values and Principles

of Humanitarian Action

Humanitarian action, as understood by its practitioners, is governed by two founda-

tional values of humanity and impartiality, which together imply that humanitarian
assistance should be provided in a non-​discriminatory manner, based on need alone.
Jean Pictet defined impartiality as comprising three components: absence of objective
discrimination on the basis of membership in a particular group (e.g. race or religion);
proportionality to needs; and the absence of any subjective distinction relating to indi-
vidual guilt or innocence (Pictet 1979). Action undertaken on the basis of these three
conditions, humanitarian actors believe, can confidently claim to be motivated by con-
cern for “humanity.”
Accompanying the core values of humanity and impartiality are a further set of oper-
ating principles designed to create a non-​political stance towards a conflict or crisis
situation, thereby building trust between third-​party humanitarians and local actors.
The neutrality principle (which is not explicitly articulated in the Geneva Conventions)
grows out of the third component of impartiality, and requires humanitarian actors both
to suspend judgement about the causes of conflict and suffering and to avoid actions
that would help or hinder one party or the other. It is nonetheless important to note
that neutrality is not a value in itself, but rather a means of obtaining access to the vic-
tims (Thurer 2007). The second and related operating principle is independence, which
emphasizes that organizations engaged in humanitarian work must retain their auton-
omy from states, combatants, and other local or international authorities. As with the
principle of neutrality, independence is used as a basis upon which humanitarian act-
ors can further assure conflict parties that the provision of assistance is defined by need
alone, rather than shaped by political or other strategic objectives.
 Humanitarian Actors and IPT    319

As much as the values and principles of humanitarian work are action-​guiding, it is

also obvious that they are aspirational. These are ideals which must be interpreted in
context. Hence some in the humanitarian community have begun to point to virtue eth-
ics as the perspective most suited to conceptualizing humanitarian ethics, to judging
humanitarian action, and to creating a stronger ethical culture within humanitarian
organizations themselves. Hugo Slim, for example, contends that humanitarian ethics
is really about “interpreting ethical limits and balancing various principles” rather than
acting out a mission or code of conduct (Slim 2015: 19). This conclusion recognizes that
humanitarian values and principles can, and frequently do, clash within operational
contexts, giving rise to trade-​offs among humanity, impartiality, and independence.
A particularly stark example arises where some form of complicity with an egregious
regime or warring party is needed in order to secure access for humanitarian assistance.
As the analysis in subsequent sections will show, these trade-​offs have become even
more pronounced as humanitarian actors have increased their explicit commitment to
human rights protection. Whether it is the increasing imperative to protect civilians in
the context of peacekeeping, or the transition from a “needs-​based” assistance delivery
model to a “rights-​based” approach, many humanitarian actors have leant more expli-
citly in the direction of cosmopolitan values, with significant implications for how they
relate to representatives of sovereign states.

The United Nations and the “New”

Impartiality

The Preamble of the United Nations Charter articulates the organization’s dual ambi-
tion: to foster intergovernmental cooperation to address the sources of international
instability and armed violence; and to create for individuals, through peace and devel-
opment, “better standards of life in larger freedom.” Yet while development has been at
the heart of the UN’s institutional architecture from its earliest days through the work
of its agencies, the institutionalization of its human rights and humanitarian aims came
significantly later, with the creation of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights (OHCHR) in 1993 and the establishment of the Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 1998.
Similarly, though the advent of United Nations peacekeeping in 1956 enabled the
organization to compensate for its inability to fulfil its Charter aspirations in the con-
text of a divided Cold War world, its early practice was defined and circumscribed by
the consent of the warring parties and not by the needs of populations experiencing
the scourge of armed conflict. The form of impartiality that underpinned UN action
was therefore of a very particular kind. The UN’s authority to act did not rest, as with
non-​governmental humanitarian actors, on its claim to be serving the needs of glo-
bal humanity; instead, it derived from intergovernmental agreement expressed in
320   Jennifer M. Welsh

the Charter, or, in the particular conflict contexts in which it was operating, the peace
agreement reached by warring parties and the mandate crafted by the Security Council.
Peacekeeping thus reinforced rather than challenged the state-​centric commitments of
the Charter (Paddon 2016: 49–​51).
Over time, however, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations
has evolved into an actor whose identity is conceived as a three-​legged stool: peace and
security, development, and human rights. And as a more conscious humanitarian actor,
its doctrine and operations have increasingly been aimed at individual wellbeing and
flourishing. As its outgoing Secretary-​General, Ban Ki-​moon, declared in his last report
to the General Assembly on the Responsibility to Protect: “The security of ‘we the peo-
ples’ matters every bit as much as the security of states” (UN 2016).
At the same time, this more cosmopolitan approach does not always sit easily with
the UN’s inter-​governmental “constitution,” which is built on the principle of state con-
sent and its declared respect for state sovereignty and self-​determination. This tension
is evident in the policy dilemmas that have arisen for the organization, both in contexts
where it has established a formal mission through intergovernmental negotiation and in
so-​called non-​mission settings where the UN is represented by its agencies.

Mission Settings: The Advent of Robust Peacekeeping

While the difficulties associated with creating and maintaining impartiality were
already on full display with the UN mission in the Congo in 1960, it was the experi-
ences of the United Nations in the 1990s that called into question the sustainability of
past approaches to peacekeeping. UN-​authorized forces were now deployed in conflict
situations within states rather than between them, and more often than not pursued a
wide range of peacemaking and peacebuilding activities that directly impacted upon
the domestic structure and institutions of conflict-​affected societies. Through this more
multi-​dimensional approach, the UN could not continue to uphold the pretence that
it was committed to upholding any kind of social and political order, since some of the
core elements of the new brand of peacekeeping were based largely on liberal demo-
cratic ideals and frequently entailed governance functions that eroded, or in some cases
usurped, domestic authority (Orford 2011). An additional factor that compromised the
premises of impartiality and host-​state consent was the absence or breakdown of peace
agreements and ceasefires. In Somalia, for example, the first UN mission (UNOSOM)
was deployed in 1992 in a context where there was no sovereign government to pro-
vide consent for the presence of peacekeepers, and where the warring factions’ acqui-
escence could not be sustained. It was little surprise, therefore, that UNOSOM’s actions
and decisions were perceived by some conflict actors as partial and beneficial to the war
efforts of their enemies.
Even more significant, however, were the lessons the United Nations and key member
states drew from the disastrous experiences of Rwanda and Srebrenica. The inaction of
peacekeepers in the face of mass slaughter was viewed as a moral failure, stemming from
 Humanitarian Actors and IPT    321

an excessive reliance on the explicit consent of conflict parties and an overly restrictive
understanding of the UN’s core objective. With the release of a major review of peace-
keeping in August 2000, the so-​called Brahimi Report, peacekeeping doctrine entered
a new era, in which impartiality would no longer be constrained by the injunction to
ensure the continued consent of all parties, or to use force only in self-​defence. Instead,
where “local parties consist not of moral equals but of obvious aggressors and victims,”
peacekeepers were to stand ready to “oppose obvious evil” (UN 2000: 9). Beginning
with the conflict in Sierra Leone in 1999, the Security Council thus routinely began to
include civilian protection in its peacekeeping mandates. While missions in the past had
called for peacekeepers to safeguard humanitarian corridors or accompany humanitar-
ian convoys, now Council resolutions explicitly authorized them to see protection as
their “core business.”
Whereas during the Cold War-era peacekeepers practised a passive form of imparti-
ality to keep warring factions apart, contemporary peacekeepers are both expected and
mandated to “penalise infractions” (UN 2008) committed by either side. This shift in
doctrine and practice has led to offensive military engagements by UN peacekeepers,
including the Force Intervention Brigades in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in
2013–​14, or the military strikes close to the palace of the former president of the Ivory
Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, following contested elections in 2011—​a response seen by
some member states as effectively making the UN a party to the conflict (Bellamy and
Williams 2011).
The new conception of impartiality underpinning the UN’s more robust
approach—​what Emily Paddon dubs “assertive impartiality” (Paddon 2016)—​retains
the original procedural requirement that peacekeepers implement their mandate in
an unbiased fashion, without “favour or prejudice to any party” (UN 2008). However,
the substantive basis for the UN’s decision-​making authority and action has evolved,
from one focused on the agreement reached between conflict parties to one that
seeks to implement international humanitarian and human rights law, the broader
UN Charter, and more general international norms that are presumed to enjoy wide-
spread consensus. This normatively ambitious basis for judgement, which is usually
but not always explicitly reflected in peacekeeping mandates, frequently challenges
the foundational principle of consent. The “blue helmets of today,” Paddon argues,
have effectively become police officers, as they “are now expected to search for, and
then side with, the victims” (Paddon 2016: 66, 1). Indeed, some have explicitly called
for a transformation of peacekeeping into a form of “cosmopolitan law enforcement”
(Kaldor 2006: 212).
At the operational level, however, the practice of assertive impartiality has involved
subjective and thus controversial judgements about which local actors are the greatest
threat to victims. The frequent result is inconsistency: peacekeepers undertake force-
ful action against some armed actors but not others, with no transparent rationale for
differing treatment. Assertive impartiality has also been compromised by a mismatch
between the robust mandate frequently given to peacekeeping forces and the actual cap-
acity provided to the mission.
322   Jennifer M. Welsh

But perhaps the greatest operational challenge has been the collateral and unintended
effects—​in some cases amounting to moral hazard—​of a more assertive approach
to peacekeeping. As Paddon demonstrates in her case study of the UN Mission in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), civilians who were promised pro-
tection by the United Nations were emboldened to take greater risks. Instead of flee-
ing to possible safety, they remained in place, or travelled in insecure conditions to UN
bases. When protection was forthcoming, the risks were worthwhile; but when it was
not, the consequences could be fatal. At the same time, both armed groups and factions
of the national army were able to instrumentalize the civilian protection mandate of
MONUSCO in order to change perceptions of their own legitimacy, and thereby realize
other strategic and political aims—​including, in some case, the de-​legitimization of the
peacekeeping mission itself. This had significant implications for the UN’s ability to act
and be accepted as a political arbiter (Paddon 2016).

Non-​mission Settings: Putting Human Rights “Up Front”

The elevation of protection as a core objective of United Nations operations is also
manifest in the organization’s operational approach in non-​missions settings, where the
presence of UN agencies results from bilateral negotiation with a government rather
than authorization through an intergovernmental process in the Security Council or
Peacebuilding Commission. Here, the catalyst for change was the “lessons learned”
exercise that followed the final phases of the conflict in Sri Lanka from 2008 to 2009,
and the damning critique of an internal review panel of UN development and humani-
tarian officials’ failure to protect civilian populations caught in the crossfire (UN 2012).
The principal report finding was that UN agencies had not only under-​reported viola-
tions of human rights and humanitarian law by state-​sponsored actors, but also caved in
to government restrictions on their presence and operations in order to both avoid con-
frontation with authorities in Colombo and maintain humanitarian access. In practice,
however, humanitarian access had all but disappeared, and broader political efforts to
bring about a negotiated settlement gained very little traction. Hence UN agencies oper-
ating on the ground received almost no concessions for their acquiescence and were
relegated to supporting camps—​euphemistically described by the Sri Lankan govern-
ment as “welfare villages”—​where traumatized civilians fleeing the conflict zone were
subject to further screening and detention by the state’s military forces.
The panel concluded that the death of thousands of civilians in Sri Lanka in the con-
cluding months of the war pointed to a “systemic failure” of the UN, extending across its
various departments and agencies (at both field and headquarters level), and reaching
down to individual member states. In particular, members of the panel highlighted the
lack of a “shared sense of responsibility” (UN 2012: para. 80) for addressing extreme
human rights violations, and a misguided attempt to separate the humanitarian response
from what officials described as “political issues”—​namely, anything related to the root
causes of the conflict or the parties’ conduct of the war. While the report acknowledged
 Humanitarian Actors and IPT    323

the UN’s core challenge—​“retaining the essential support of a Government to help in

delivering assistance while at the same time responding to serious violations of inter-
national law that may require the UN to issue criticism of the same Government”—​it
criticized a reigning “institutional culture of trade-​offs” which prevented UN staff from
leveraging the organization’s full range of capacities. The choice between striving for
humanitarian access and robustly condemning the perpetrators of killings of civilians
was in the end a false one (UN 2012: para. 75).

Humanitarian NGOs and

the “Rights-​Based Approach”

At the end of the 1980s, roughly the same time that the United Nations was evolving
towards a more robust form of peacekeeping, humanitarian agencies engaged in deep
introspection over their rights and responsibilities as third-​party actors in conflict.
While classical humanitarianism had been directed at the alleviation of suffering in con-
texts of disaster or war, greater attention to the causes of that suffering came in the wake
of sustained criticism of humanitarian actors for perpetuating a world of the “well-​fed
dead” (New York Times 1992; Terry 2002). Successful humanitarian relief, many came to
believe, was no substitute for successful conflict resolution and rebuilding.
One outgrowth of this shift from a paradigm of charity to one of justice was the
so-​called rights-​based approach to humanitarian assistance, which claimed that the
broader purpose of humanitarian action should be to create the “basic conditions for life
with dignity” (Ferris 2011: 195). If humanitarian needs are understood as emerging out of
widespread human rights violations, it then follows that those engaged in humanitarian
action must address not only immediate symptoms but also the underlying or structural
causes of vulnerability. This argument thus gave rise to new criteria for the distribu-
tion of assistance—​criticized by some as creating a hierarchy of aid recipients which is
biased against perceived “spoilers” or human rights violators (Rieff 2002)—​as well as
the increased involvement of humanitarian organizations in a broad array of activities
under the banner of protection, extending beyond emergency relief to the transform-
ation of political and social institutions in ways that enhance human rights.
The implications of this more “solidarist” approach to humanitarian action (Aneja
2013) had already been revealed decades earlier, during the Biafran war, when organ-
izations such as Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had argued that the gross
violation of the rights of the Biafran people superseded the sovereignty of the Nigerian
state. Obtaining the government of Nigeria’s consent for the delivery of humanitarian
assistance, they insisted, was both unnecessary and morally suspect. MSF went a step
further, calling upon humanitarian actors to “bear witness” and speak out for the rights
of victims. In so doing, it challenged the long-​standing idea of a bargain of non-​interfer-
ence between humanitarian actors and warring parties: that the former would commit
324   Jennifer M. Welsh

to political non-​interference in the conflict and ensure their assistance would not give
unfair advantage to either side, while the latter would then commit to non-​interference
in aid allocations (Givoni 2011).
The tension between rights protection and the promise of non-​interference has had
significant operational consequences for humanitarian agencies in a variety of political
emergencies in the post-​Cold War period. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, for example,
several non-​governmental organizations morphed into “humanitarian warriors” calling
for Western intervention (Barnett 2011: 189). As a consequence, their personnel were
not only denied access to civilians who had clear humanitarian needs but also became
legitimate targets of Serbian military action. Similarly, during the conflict in Darfur in
2003–​4, humanitarian agencies went well beyond the provision of life-​saving assistance
to advocate for human rights protection, claiming that neutrality was not an operational
principle designed to gain access, but a moral principle that required them to protest
the crimes committed by state-​backed militia against civilians. When Sudan’s president,
Omar Bashir, was faced with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court,
he levelled blame at the public advocacy of humanitarian actors, and expelled a number
of them from the country.
The interpretation of humanitarian action as an endeavour to ensure rights—​defined
as “needs”—​transforms its essence. As two practitioners have aptly noted, it moves that
quest “beyond the voluntary provision of assistance to the provision of assistance on the
basis of a legitimate claim for it on the part of its beneficiaries. In the process, victims
or beneficiaries become rights holders, and humanitarian agencies become their advo-
cates” (O’Callaghan and Pantuliano 2007: 8) Humanitarian actors thus become driven
by the general duties they perceive themselves to have, rather than by the humanitarian
needs they are mandated to meet in a particular context.

Conflicting Values: Real or Apparent?

Lurking beneath the operational challenges faced by contemporary humanitarian actors

are deeper conflicts of norms and values that have long been of interest to international
political theory. As the above analysis suggests, two of the most prominent issues facing
such actors relate to the sources of their authority, and whether it must be based on
explicit consent, and the moral weight of collective self-​determination, as expressed in
state sovereignty, when set against the moral importance of individual human rights.

Potential Strategies for Resolution

How might actors address these value conflicts? Theoretically, we might conceive of a
spectrum of approaches, ranging from, at one end, a principled and general attempt
to integrate two sets of important values to more ad hoc strategies that respond with a
 Humanitarian Actors and IPT    325

particular, context-​specific solution. In between these two extremes would sit various
strategies of value reconciliation and institutional adaptation, which enable actors to
reduce the frequency and severity of dilemmas (even if conflicts between values cannot
be completely eliminated).
The first approach entails the reconceptualization of a normative terrain, such that
one value or norm is consistently prioritized over another. An example is the notion of
“sovereignty as responsibility,” discussed in Chapter 25 of this volume. Under this recon-
ceptualization of sovereignty, sovereignty and human rights become integrated, and are
assumed to be directed at the same (ultimate) objective.
A second approach along the spectrum, reconciliation, seeks not a general solution
but rather the creation of context-​specific relationships between competing norms and
values. An illustration is the legal practice of “interpretive complementarity” (Bhuta
2008), which is applied to situations where there are two legal regimes considered rele-
vant and appropriate, with neither necessarily subordinate to the other. Both regimes
thus apply, non-​exclusively, to the same set of circumstances, often with one normative
framework supplementing the other. Nehal Bhuta explains this approach in the context
of armed conflict, where both international humanitarian law and international human
rights law are said to have jurisdiction. Through interpretive complementarity, “IHR
rules and principles are used to inform and ‘humanize’ IHL rules; or IHL rules are used
to give content to IHR rules in certain exceptional states” (Bhuta 2008: 252)
The furthest end of the spectrum is marked by the lack of any systematic approach
to addressing value conflicts. Instead, actors facing conflicts of values can engage in
sequencing, or principled inconsistency, through a case-​by-​case assessment of which
value to privilege in any given situation. Such judgements can be underpinned by an
actor’s genuine commitment to both values and reluctance to permanently abandon
either. An example is the “peace first, justice later” approach to addressing the dilemmas
that arise from efforts to pursue accountability for perpetrators of international crimes
in the midst of an armed conflict.

Conclusion: Resolution in Practice

As suggested earlier in this chapter, the United Nations is a very particular kind of polit-
ical and humanitarian actor, whose very existence and purpose is premised upon inter-
governmental agreement. Since the end of the Cold War, it has attempted to honour
that heritage, while simultaneously pursuing a more cosmopolitan interpretation of its
humanitarian responsibilities (see Chapter 3).
In the case of peacekeeping, the increasing focus on the protection of individual vic-
tims has posed three central dilemmas. The first two stem from the claim that the UN’s
authority—​impartiality—​is no longer based on an explicit or fixed notion of consent,
but on more fundamental norms as expressed in the Charter and international humani-
tarian and human rights law. But this raises the question of how to weigh the human
326   Jennifer M. Welsh

rights leg of the UN “stool” with the Charter’s commitment to self-​determination and
sovereign equality—​both of which emphasize the need for states to consent, through
multilateral processes, to the rules that regulate their behaviour. This question becomes
even more relevant when we consider the vocal objections raised by many developing
countries about the assertive version of impartiality and its potential to undermine state
sovereignty (Non-​Aligned Movement 2012: paras 143.2, 143.12).
Second, it is not always clear how the appeal to “humanity’s law” (Teitel 2011) can
be squared with the fact that the consent of the main parties, which includes the host
state, remains essential to the presence of peacekeeping forces on a sovereign terri-
tory. How are UN-​authorized forces to execute their mandate to protect civilians
against any actor that violates their rights, while at the same time supporting the
government—​the primary bearer of the responsibility to provide long-​term protec-
tion and the agent whose strategic consent remains essential to their presence? When
the state’s armed forces are themselves engaged in violence against civilians, as has
been the case, for example, in UN missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(DRC) and South Sudan, the stabilization and capacity-​building elements of peace-
keeping can be criticized for strengthening the very actors that are committing viola-
tions against populations.
The UN’s attempts to address these dilemmas have been both substantive and ad hoc.
At the doctrinal level, it has insisted on a distinction between “strategic consent” and
“tactical consent.” The former is obtained from the main parties to a conflict (includ-
ing the host state) and is a fundamental requirement for the deployment and ongoing
presence of a peacekeeping mission. Consent at the tactical level, by contrast, is often
secured from non-​state armed groups or factions on the margins of a political process.
According to UN doctrine, this form of consent is no longer necessary, and the tac-
tical use of force by peacekeepers can be justified against any armed group (including
the state’s army or security forces) that pose an imminent threat of violence to civil-
ians (UN 2008: 34). At the institutional level, the United Nations has responded to the
potential for complicity with armed actors engaged in violence against civilians with
initiatives such as the Human Rights Due Diligence Policy, which stipulates that the
UN cannot provide support to non-​UN armed actors “where there are substantial
grounds for believing there is a real risk of the receiving entities committing grave vio-
lations of international humanitarian, human rights or refugee law” (UN 2013a). And
finally, at a tactical level, peacekeeping missions have made ad hoc decisions to with-
hold certain forms of support to governments deemed to be failing in their responsi-
bility to protect their population—​either through specific provisions in the mandate
or through internal directives from the Secretary-​General or Under-​Secretary-​General
for Peacekeeping.
While none of these responses represents an ambitious effort to reconceptualize
the UN’s role as a humanitarian actor, some do attempt to specify the relationship that
should prevail between values that have come into tension in the context of peacekeep-
ing (e.g. state consent and civilian protection). The UN’s Human Rights Up Front initia-
tive, which was the organization’s response to the panel report on Sri Lanka, is a more
 Humanitarian Actors and IPT    327

comprehensive and systemic effort to prioritize the protection of populations from sys-
tematic violence, through changes in the way that information is gathered and analysed,
new training for all UN staff, and reform of the organization’s decision-​making struc-
ture (UN 2013b). The jury is still out, however, on whether the initiative can deliver the
significant culture change needed to place serious human rights violations at the centre
of the work of all departments and agencies.
More fundamentally, it is not desirable for the United Nations to transcend its dual
identity as a humanitarian and political actor (even if it could). This brings us to the
third and final dilemma posed by robust peacekeeping, and its prioritization of individ-
ual protection: how to sustain the UN’s new basis for impartiality—​which is believed
to rest on apolitical norms—​while at the same time enabling a political solution to an
armed conflict. Sceptics of assertive impartiality lament that peacekeeping mandates
that emphasize protection can all too easily become a substitute for the ingredient so
often required to bring conflict to an end: political engagement by third parties with
a capacity to exercise influence. This concern was echoed in the most recent review of
UN peacekeeping, where panel members suggested that peacekeeping operations had
lost sight of their deeper political purposes and had to “get back to basics.” “Lasting
peace is achieved not through military and technical engagements,” the report insists,
“but through political solutions” (UN 2015: viii). The grammar of human rights, and
the imperative to “penalize infractions,” can in some cases limit the UN’s appreciation
for the fluid identities of actors within conflict situations and the possibility that today’s
victims can quickly become tomorrow’s perpetrators. In addition, it can overlook the
degree to which conflict is both unpredictable and transformative. After all, humani-
tarian actors rarely confront violent individuals—​who make unilateral and rational
choices—​but rather violent situations (Collins 2008: 1), which emerge from the complex
interaction between an armed actor, his/​her group, a developing context of conflict, and
deeper political and social conditions.

Acknowledgement
The research leading to this publication has received funding from the European
Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Agreement (FP/​
2007-​2013)/​ERC Grant Agreement no. 340956.

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 ­c hapter 25

T he “Resp onsi bi l i t y
to Protec t ” a nd
Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

James Pattison

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is the doctrine that states have the responsibility to
protect their populations from potential mass atrocities; if they are unable or unwill-
ing to do so, the international community has a remedial responsibility to protect the
population at risk. The doctrine was first presented in a 2001 report, The Responsibility
to Protect, by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS). This report argues that there is a responsibility to prevent mass atrocities, to
react to them, and to rebuild afterwards. R2P was subsequently endorsed unanimously
by states at the 2005 UN World Summit, albeit with some delimiting of the original pro-
posal. A third major iteration of R2P was presented by Ban Ki-​moon in his 2009 report,
Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, which divides R2P into three pillars: pillar
I concerns the responsibilities of states to protect their own populations; pillar II con-
cerns the international remedial responsibility to assist states that are unable to protect;
and pillar III concerns the international remedial responsibility to coerce and encour-
age states that are unwilling to protect.
R2P has since become the predominant frame within which domestic and inter-
national measures to mass atrocities are considered. Perhaps most notably, R2P was
referred to in the UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the NATO-​
led intervention in Libya in 2011 in response to ongoing and impending human rights
violations by the Gaddafi regime. More generally, a huge array of international actors,
from domestic political parties to human rights NGOs and the UN Security Council,
have used the language of R2P to call upon states to prevent and respond to mass atro-
cities within their own borders (see Chapter 24). Central to the doctrine is the notion
of humanitarian intervention and, in particular, the notion that the international
 The “Responsibility to Protect” and IPT    331

community should not stand by militarily in the face of mass atrocities, such as in
Rwanda in 1994. Notwithstanding, R2P concerns a whole range of domestic and inter-
national responses to prevent and respond to mass atrocity, from developing early
warning capacity of mass atrocities, to assisting states to reform their criminal justice
systems, to targeted economic sanctions and other more coercive measures.
In this chapter, I will consider the development and status of R2P within the con-
text of broader debates in International Political Theory (IPT). I will make three main
points. The first is that central to the appeal—​and success—​of R2P is that its central
premises of (1) sovereignty as responsibility, (2) states as primary duty-​bearers, and
(3) the remedial responsibility of the international community strike a generally coher-
ent and plausible balance between statist and cosmopolitan concerns in international
society. The second is that, notwithstanding, R2P still faces challenges from statism
and cosmopolitanism. These include the apparent statism of R2P’s pillar II and the
worries amongst certain non-​Western states (including some of the BRICS—​Brazil,
Russia, India, China, and South Africa) that R2P still has a strong liberal cosmopolitan
influence. The third is that the question of whether R2P is efficacious, which has been
subject to much of the recent debate on R2P, is somewhat unproductive, at least as the
debate is currently conceived. This is because central to assessing the efficacy of R2P is
a tricky counterfactual judgement of the utility and feasibility of potential alternative
norms. I conclude by arguing that a far more practically important issue in regard to
efficacy is how much political will should be invested in R2P, relative to other morally
valuable agenda. This, I suggest, is an issue that IPT should consider, but thus far has
been largely ignored.
Before beginning, a few clarifications are required. First, I take “statism” to be the
view that the state is the primary moral unit and that there are very limited, if any, inter-
national responsibilities, particularly positive responsibilities. This view may encapsu-
late some forms of communitarianism, English School pluralism, and moral accounts
of Realism, to the extent that they emphasize the moral centrality of the state. Second,
I take “cosmopolitanism” to be the view that the individual is the primary moral unit
and that the various actors in the international community owe extensive international
responsibilities, including positive ones (see Chapter 3). Cosmopolitanism, on this
account, allows some scope for special responsibilities to family members, friends, and
co-​nationals, but these compete with, and may be outweighed by, the moral import of
international responsibilities.1

Statism, Cosmopolitanism, and R2P

The practical and theoretical debate in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s about humani-
tarian intervention and mass atrocities were often polarized between statists and lib-
eral cosmopolitans (from here on “cosmopolitans”).2 This was not simply a matter of
academic discussion; it was played out in various international fora between states, in
332   James Pattison

particular in relation to the crises in the Balkans in the 1990s. In what follows, I will offer
a brief, broadbrush summary of the main claims of these camps.
Cosmopolitans argue that state sovereignty should not be seen as a black box, where
what goes on within a state’s borders is of no concern of the international community.
Rather, states have responsibilities to protect their own population, to give them a voice
in political decision-​making, and to ensure that there is general compliance with human
rights norms. As a corollary, cosmopolitans argue that there is a right of humanitarian
intervention in response to the mass violation of basic human rights. The importance of
maintaining state sovereignty and international order should not prohibit humanitarian
intervention, as long as the intervention will meet the requisite conditions of Just War
Theory.
By contrast, statists argue that what goes on within a state’s borders is largely its own
business. In doing so, they argue that external interference, such as by major Western
powers, can amount to paternalism and even to neo-​imperialism, where Western
notions of human rights are forced upon communities. They also highlight the poten-
tially negative effects of intervention on international order and the importance of
maintaining state sovereignty, and often press the claim that humanitarian intervention
is used mendaciously to promote the narrow material self-​interest of the intervening
powers. Statists are particularly critical of unilateral intervention, i.e. intervention with-
out UN Security Council authorization, which many cosmopolitans hold is not neces-
sary for justifiable humanitarian intervention.
R2P has been able to gain much traction and achieve widespread international sup-
port because it strikes a convincing and coherent balance between these two seem-
ingly polarized positions.3 Its central premises of (1) sovereignty as responsibility and
(2) the remedial responsibility of the international community still place the state at the
heart of international politics, whilst admitting the justifiability of humanitarian inter-
vention on occasion. Along with cosmopolitans, R2P denies that sovereignty is a black
box and asserts that what goes on within the borders of the state is a matter for inter-
national concern. Yet R2P also holds that the state is the primary agent for fulfilling this
responsibility, thereby giving states the largest role in fulfilling R2P. The scope of R2P
is also focused on only four sorts of atrocity—​genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing,
and crimes against humanity—​meaning that it is only in the most extreme sort of case
that external interference could potentially be warranted under R2P. It also requires UN
Security Council authorization for humanitarian intervention to be permissible, which
ameliorates some of the concerns about unilateral intervention, such as NATO’s 1999
intervention in Kosovo.4
R2P has caught on, then, because on the one hand it captures the intuitive claim that
humanitarian intervention is permissible in response to situations such as Rwanda in
1994 and on the other it places the state at its heart. It limits the focus to major cases
where the ethical impulse seems most pressing, but avoids more controversial issues
surrounding unilateral intervention and intervention in less serious cases. It also avoids
statist worries (often found in the West, such as amongst certain policy communities
in the US) about international responsibilities that are too demanding, and largely
 The “Responsibility to Protect” and IPT    333

avoids the question of major reform of the current systems of global governance, which
is advocated by some cosmopolitans. It also allows scope for action to redress human
rights issues that could lead to mass atrocities, under the umbrella of the responsibility
to prevent, but in a largely consensual manner under the first two pillars of R2P.

Ongoing Challenges

Notwithstanding, the balancing act of R2P means that it continues to face challenges
from more vehement statists and cosmopolitans. Perhaps most notably, statists worry
that R2P can be used to support Western-​led regime change. The worry was particularly
prevalent in the aftermath of the 2011 intervention in Libya. As noted in the first sec-
tion, UN Security Council resolution 1973 authorized NATO-​led international action
in Libya and cited R2P. Various states, including some of the BRICS, argued that NATO
exceeded the mandate given to it by this resolution by going on to engage in regime
change. It was also claimed that the UK, the USA, and France—​the so-​called P-​3—​acted
bombastically and arrogantly in the UN Security Council, ignoring reasonable concerns
(Evans 2012). The worry, then, was that UN Security Council authorization is not suffi-
cient to ward off the potential for de facto unilateral intervention. These worries about
regime change and unilateral intervention have been seemingly stoked by the responses
of the major Western powers to the conflict in Syria. Throughout much of the conflict,
the West was insistent that Assad must go—​that regime change was necessary. In 2013
Western powers came close to launching unilateral intervention against Assad, and in
2014 they engaged in military action against the ISIS terrorist group in Syria without
explicit UN Security Council authorization.
In response to these worries, more statist versions of R2P have been proposed. Most
notably, in November 2011 Brazil presented the “responsibility while protecting” initia-
tive, which attempts to limit some of the potential for de facto unilateral intervention. It
does so by calling for guidelines on the use of force, increased monitoring of interveners
by the UN Security Council, and for a more limited, less coercive role played by inter-
veners.5 In 2012, the Chinese scholar Ruan Zongze, who is based at the Chinese Institute
of International Studies that has links to the Chinese government, proposed the notion
of “responsible protection.” This proposal is a clear attempt to restrict Western inter-
ventionism. Its conditions are stricter than those of responsibility while protecting
(particularly the later iterations of responsibility while protecting) and following them
closely would make it almost impossible to engage in humanitarian intervention (see
Garwood-​Gowers 2016).
The reaction by R2P advocacy groups and the West to responsibility while protecting
was at first fairly hostile, but the international reaction has since become more sympa-
thetic (see Pattison 2016). It seems that something such as RwP, even if in a different
guise, will be required if humanitarian intervention is to occur again in a similar man-
ner to the action in Libya—​i.e. Western military intervention without host state consent,
334   James Pattison

authorized by the UN Security Council—​given the lingering worries about unilateral

interventionism.
Conversely, R2P faces challenges in being too statist. Perhaps most notably, the
requirement for UN Security Council authorization for robust action under pillar III
can make it harder to launch effective measures in response to governments that are
committing mass atrocities. For instance, between 2011 and 2014, Russia and China
vetoed four UN resolutions on Syria, including to refer the situation to the International
Criminal Court. Some cosmopolitans, then, still worry about the central role that R2P
gives to the UN Security Council. The “responsibility not to veto” movement, which
is led by France and Mexico and calls on the permanent members of the UN Security
Council not to veto potential resolutions in cases of mass atrocities, is in part a cosmo-
politan response to address the power that the UN Security Council has. The chances
of convincing Russia, China, and the US not to wield their veto (or to threaten to wield
the veto) in cases where their national interest is seriously at stake seem slim. But the
proposal is in reality about attempting to raise the reputational costs for permanent
members considering wielding their veto in more marginal cases, where their national
interests are not so clearly at stake and their concerns about reputational costs carry
more weight.
R2P’s second pillar can also be seen as perhaps too statist. This allows for robust inter-
national action in support of states to assist them to live up to their protection respon-
sibilities. The worries are twofold. First, the degree of coercion under pillar II could,
in fact, be very large—​full-​scale military intercession—​albeit with the consent of the
host state. Such intercession could face the various problems of military intervention,
including, most notably, high levels of civilian casualties. Such intercession may still be
morally justifiable overall, such as when a democratically elected government is strug-
gling to defeat an egregious rebel group. But the international assistance may often be
in support of governments that have little or no claim to legitimacy themselves. This
leads to the second issue, which is that such states can use this assistance to legitimize
themselves internationally and to hold onto power, as in the case of international assist-
ance to Mali in 2013 (Gallagher 2015: 1271–​4). A worry, then, is that R2P will be used by,
and become associated with, assistance to stabilize illegitimate governments. Although
some of these intercessions may be justifiable, others may be more morally problematic,
and the latter could taint R2P.

The Efficacy of R2P

The most vociferous debate about R2P has not been about its normative merits but
rather whether it is efficacious. Why does this matter? It matters, of course, for scholarly
interest in R2P and international norms more generally. But it also has a seemingly cru-
cial practical element, which has fuelled the interest in the debate. That is, if R2P is not
efficacious—​that is, if it makes no difference in addressing mass atrocities—​then there
 The “Responsibility to Protect” and IPT    335

is little merit in expending valuable political will in supporting and advocating it. If, on
the other hand, it does make a significant difference, it would appear that the case for
policy-​makers, states, and the international community supporting it is much stronger.
Underlying this debate, then, it would seem that there is an important policy issue.
Those who are more sceptical, such as Aidan Hehir and Justin Morris, argue that R2P
has had little, if any, impact on tackling mass atrocities.6 Overall, the sceptics argue that
R2P’s key, novel elements have had little international support and that it has had lit-
tle influence on events, so should be replaced by an alternative. More specifically, they
accept that pillar I of R2P—​which, recall, concerns states’ protection responsibilities
towards their own citizens—​has been cited in the international arena, such as in UN
Security Council resolutions. But they argue that this only replicates pre-​existing norms
and laws to do with human rights. They suggest that the key added-​value element of
R2P concerns the notion that there is an international responsibility to protect, which
distinguishes the doctrine from earlier norms surrounding humanitarian interven-
tion. However, this element, they suggest, is crucially absent from the official rhetoric in
key documents, such as UN resolutions. And even when the international responsibil-
ity to protect is openly accepted, this does not compel action—​words do not turn into
deeds. The lack of robust international action in response to the crises in Syria, Bahrain,
and Gaza, they claim, shows that R2P is empty rhetoric. And, even when there is inter-
national action in response to a crisis, such as in Libya, this is not because of R2P. They
claim that there is little evidence to prove that R2P influences decision-​makers and that
such action would have occurred without R2P, such as under the previous doctrine of
humanitarian intervention.
The defenders of the efficacy of R2P, such as Alex Bellamy, Luke Glanville, and
Jennifer Welsh, argue, conversely, that it has had some effect.7 They point to the citing
of R2P in key international documents, such as UN Security Council resolutions. They
also argue that states have explicitly endorsed the international responsibility to protect
(e.g. Bellamy 2015b: 169–​70) and that this is having an effect. For instance, they suggest
that there is now criticism of others’ inaction in the face of mass atrocities and failures
to live up to the international responsibility to protect, showing that conformity to R2P
is expected internationally. They also claim that R2P has influenced decision-​making,
such as in Libya. And they point to “habits of protection” that have developed, where
the international community now at least attempts to do something in response to mass
atrocities. In cases where there has been insufficient action, such as in Syria, they argue
that R2P can only have limited effect, since the importance that states give to following
the norm will sometimes be overridden by narrow material interests.
Some of this debate about the efficacy of R2P turns on a deeper theoretical disagree-
ment between constructivism and realism about the relative significance of material and
ideational factors. Those sceptical of R2P highlight that it has little significance because
states will follow the narrow material interests and ideational constructs have little
importance. The advocates of R2P, conversely, argue that norms such as R2P can and do
influence states and policy-​makers. It is worth emphasizing here, though, that even the
sceptics accept that the norm of R2P can have some influence (e.g. Hehir 2013: 159). They
336   James Pattison

doubt the relative importance of the norm. Yet, for their part, the advocates are careful
also not to overemphasize the importance of the norm. The difference, then, is not that
large: it is about how much compliance pull R2P has.
One of the central reasons for the intractability of this debate is that it turns on a very
tricky counterfactual judgement. To explicate, the sceptics’ rejection of the efficacy of
R2P is vulnerable to the following reply (e.g. in Bellamy 2015b: 171–​5): it has been cited
and seemingly made a difference. The sceptics can claim, however, that if R2P had not
developed, there would have been rival norms that would have exerted a similar influ-
ence, most notably a potential norm of humanitarian intervention. They also can argue
that alternatives should be propagated that will better address mass atrocities. Whether
these claims are accurate depends on counterfactual assessments of whether the poten-
tial alternatives would have been better. Such assessments are notoriously tricky, given
the difficulty of assessing the likely effects of alternative histories.
Notwithstanding, it is clear that any alternative would have had to overcome the
intractable political problems that R2P currently faces. Most notably, the pressures of
statism and cosmopolitanism already outlined would still be present, including statist
concerns about unilateral intervention, imperialism, and abrogating state sovereignty,
and cosmopolitan concerns about treating the state as a black box and the blocking of
humanitarian intervention. Any alternative would need to find a via media similar to
that found by R2P. In this context, Roland Paris (2014) argues that humanitarian inter-
vention suffers from “structural problems,” such as being inconsistent and causing
conspicuous harm. If his broad thesis is correct, then it means that any alternative that
encompasses humanitarian intervention would still face some of the inevitable political
controversies that arise with using coercive force for humanitarian purposes.
In fact, it is questionable whether other plausible alternatives exist that strike a via
media between statism and cosmopolitanism. There do not seem to be other, plaus-
ible ways of combining statist and cosmopolitan concerns, other than R2P. Any alter-
native would probably end up resembling R2P, if it were to achieve the same degree of
international support as R2P. Moreover, any alternative would have to obtain sufficient
international support and still be as sufficiently normatively ambitious as R2P. The doc-
trine of humanitarian intervention, which preceded R2P, was far less popular amongst
statists, yet did not include the crucial element of international responsibility in R2P—​
humanitarian intervention was seen as largely superogatory.8
The same would seem likely to occur if existing doctrines and norms were extended
to cover the terrain of R2P. If, for instance, the doctrine of human security or the norm
of protection of civilians were extended to encompass coercive and non-​coercive pre-
vention and reaction to mass atrocities, they would seemingly run into the same statist
and cosmopolitan worries that R2P faces, particularly in relation to humanitarian inter-
vention. The extension could also be an uneasy fit with the central premises of the norm.
Moreover, the question of whether there are alternatives that could have been more
successful than R2P has little practical relevance. It is really of only scholarly interest.
The question of which of humanitarian intervention, human security, R2P, or another
norm would have been best at tackling the situations in Rwanda, Kosovo, Libya, Darfur,
 The “Responsibility to Protect” and IPT    337

and so on is not of direct practical relevance to policy-​makers. R2P has been accepted
by states; historical counterfactual judgements are of little importance to forward-​
looking judgements about what should be done. To be sure, the question of whether
R2P should be replaced by alternative norms in the future is of more practical relevance.
But, as I have argued, there do not seem to be any rival plausible norms that could easily
replace R2P.
But what about more ambitious proposals, which may also be offered as an alterna-
tive to R2P?9 Reforms such as the development of cosmopolitan democratic institu-
tions, new international authorizing mechanisms of humanitarian intervention, and a
UN standing army may be morally desirable according to cosmopolitanism. However,
in the short to medium term, they are likely to run into the problem of gaining suf-
ficient international support, both from those in the global South sceptical of inter-
vention and global governance and from major Western powers whose predominance
is supported in part by the prevailing international system. Moreover, such reform is
likely to be even more difficult without the underlying normative impulse developed by
norms of R2P that reform of the international system is required to fully address mass
atrocities. Without a norm such as R2P—​in particular, the widely accepted notion that
there is a responsibility to protect that is not being fulfilled under the current global
arrangements—​it is very difficult to see where the political will and international sup-
port for reform of the international system could come from.
There is a notable further problem with alternatives to R2P: any alternative proposal
or norm would have to take into account the transition costs that are likely to occur as
R2P is replaced by the alternative. The transition costs include the following. First, sig-
nificant political will is likely to be required to develop and propagate the alternative,
which could instead be used to advance further and entrench R2P. Second, there is the
risk of an extended period whereby there is no norm governing mass atrocities, as R2P
is jettisoned and the alternative is not fully supported, which could result in inaction in
response to any mass atrocities that occurred during this period. Third, there is a risk
of confusion and competition between the alternative and R2P, which could abrogate
precious general international consensus and responses to mass atrocities, as different
states support rival norms and use these to buttress their own national interest rather
than do what is required to address mass atrocities.
To jettison R2P, then, one would have to be very confident that (1) R2P is failing, com-
pared to potential alternatives that would also seemingly face intractable political issues
surrounding statists and cosmopolitans’ worries about intervention and sovereignty
respectively. One would also have to be very confident that (2) an alternative would be
better, and not simply in terms of its ideal normative credentials, but also in terms of the
level of acceptance that it would have, which is crucial for it becoming a norm and exert-
ing influence. One would also have to be very confident that (3) there would be few tran-
sition costs. I do not think there is reason to be confident about any of these three points.
As such, in terms of addressing mass atrocities, R2P is currently the main game in town.
In summary, the efficacy of R2P ultimately depends on a counterfactual assessment
about the alternative possible norms that would have developed had R2P not been
338   James Pattison

adopted. Although this is perhaps intellectually interesting, it is somewhat politically

and practically irrelevant. This is because, even if in the past alternative norms might
have achieved similar results, R2P appears to be exerting influence here and now, and,
going forward, there are no plausible future alternatives to R2P. Any alternatives are
likely to face significant transition costs and to have to strike a balance between cosmo-
politanism and statism. To that extent, the debate about the efficacy of R2P, at least as the
debate is currently framed, is somewhat practically redundant.

R2P and the Prioritization of Goals

There is, however, a central question concerning the efficacy of R2P that, as far as I am
aware, has not been considered in the literature on R2P and IPT and that is more prac-
tically relevant. Although R2P seems to be efficacious in regard to tackling mass atro-
cities, it is less clear whether it is efficacious more generally compared to norms that
promote other goals.
Many defenders of R2P would admit that, although it has been successful and had a
notable impact, its successes are necessarily modest. This is in part due to the intract-
ability surrounding intervention and sovereignty. There is a limit to how successful R2P
could be: there will not be intervention in all places where required and mass atrocities
cannot be completely prevented or tackled in the current international system. Political
will is valuable and finite. There is only a limited amount of effort that politicians are
likely to expend on international matters and only a limited degree of resources that
states will respond to the concerns of those beyond their borders. There are also limited
funds in terms of lobbying and limited academic resources in terms of investigating, pro-
posing, and propagating international norms, as well as a limited amount of time during
which domestic and international audiences will engage with advocacy and scholarship.
The question, then, is whether political will should be exerted elsewhere, in promot-
ing other norms, where there might be the potential for greater impact. Should, for
instance, more effort be put into promoting gender equality, global health, climate just-
ice (see Chapter 14), international aid, and tackling unfair trade deals, rather than pro-
moting R2P? At least two considerations would need to be taken into account in this
assessment. The first concerns the normative importance of the relative agenda. The sec-
ond concerns the degree of impact that the agenda is likely to have on the issue.
R2P may face notable challenges when assessed according to these considerations.
First, the tackling and prevention of mass atrocities is, of course, of huge normative
importance, but the numbers killed by mass atrocities is far smaller than the number of
killed by curable diseases and poverty (see Chapter 27), and potentially the future gener-
ations that will suffer the ill effects of climate change. To put it colloquially, why should
a state invest $2 billion intervening militarily to stop the mass killing of 10,000, if that
amount could be used to save 100,000 future lives by ameliorating some of the impact
of climate change? The subject matter of R2P—​mass atrocities—​seems particularly
 The “Responsibility to Protect” and IPT    339

pressing because of the fact that it involves the intentional violation of basic human
rights by those committing the mass atrocities, whereas the other phenomena appear
to concern the reckless or negligent violation of basic human rights. Other things being
equal, an intentional violation is worse than a reckless or negligent one. But it is ques-
tionable how much worse intentional violations are. It seems unlikely that they are so
much worse that it is better to tackle one intentional violation than it is to tackle ten neg-
ligent or culpable ones.
Second, as we have seen, the impact of R2P is widely accepted—​ even by its
advocates—​to be limited. But even if it were significant, it might still be better to pursue
other agendas. This will be the case if (1) these agendas concern a much more morally
pressing issue—​i.e. many more lives are at serious risk—​than mass atrocities and (2) the
impact of these agendas will be sufficiently large to lead to more lives being protected
overall.
This might appear to give more grist to the mill of R2P sceptics about the efficacy
of R2P. Yet to claim that R2P is comparatively inefficacious compared to an alternative
agenda would pose the sceptics a serious problem. To present the objection about alter-
native agenda, they would have to admit that the other agenda could have significant
normative compliance pull, which would appear to be incongruent with their realism
and consequent scepticism about the compliance pull of norms in general. Admitting
that other norms may be very efficacious would appear to cede too much ground to con-
structivism and open sceptics to the challenge that R2P is efficacious for similar reasons
as the alternative agenda.
The question of the comparative efficaciousness of various agendas is, then, import-
ant for R2P scholars and more generally IPT to engage with. Although it may seem that
this may lead to a rejection of R2P, there is reason to suppose that (at least) two compli-
cating considerations mean it should be still invested with significant political will.
The first is that the investment of political will is not a zero-​sum game. Most obviously,
tackling mass atrocities may sometimes play an important role in addressing other
goals, such as gender equality and global poverty, for instance, to the extent that secur-
ity is necessary for development. In addition, there may be larger domestic and inter-
national audiences for addressing mass atrocities than for other agendas. Many states
appear to be much more concerned about addressing intentional violations than unin-
tentional ones. There may sometimes be scope, then, only to act upon mass atrocities,
given limited political interest in other areas. The choice between investing $2 billion to
engage in humanitarian intervention or in climate change may often be a false one. The
real choice will be whether to engage in humanitarian intervention or to do nothing, as
the interests of future generations figure only slightly in the concern of states.
The second is that international justice, broadly conceived, may be best served by
having a wide range of well-​developed norms governing the most normatively press-
ing issues. Once such norms have been established, there may be diminishing marginal
returns for the further advancement of the norm, compared to its initial development.
Given that R2P is still in its relative infancy, it may be worth continuing to establish and
institutionalize it in the short to medium term. In the medium to long term, however,
340   James Pattison

this effort may face diminishing marginal returns as R2P becomes more fixed and insti-
tutionalized and less contested, and political effort may be better expended elsewhere.

Conclusion

This chapter has made three main points. First, R2P strikes a plausible balance between
statist and cosmopolitan concerns in international society. Second, R2P still faces
challenges from various statists and cosmopolitans, including that it enables de facto
unilateral humanitarian intervention and that its second pillar can be used to uphold
illegitimate states. Third, the current debate about efficacy of R2P largely depends on a
counterfactual assessment of whether alternative norms would have achieved similar
results, which is somewhat academic. A far more pressing issue concerns the efficacy of
R2P vis-​à-​vis other potential agenda. I have suggested that R2P is still worthy of invest-
ment of political will, given its infancy, although this argument may fade if there are
diminishing marginal returns. Crucially, the future of R2P should depend on how its
efficacy contrasts to other potential alternatives and other agenda.

Notes
1. This is a more moderate and plausible form of cosmopolitanism than how the view is some-
times defined, i.e. as denying any special responsibilities.
2. Seminal works in the debate include Beitz (1980), Chesterman (2001), Holzgrefe and
Keohane (2003), Tesón (1997), and Walzer (1980).
3. Bellamy (2015a: 84–​5) makes a similar point.
4. By contrast, Orford worries that R2P “represents a significant shift in thinking about the
lawfulness of authority in the modern world” away from sovereign equality and towards
“international executive action,” and that “the articulation and embrace of the responsibility
to protect concept represents one of the most significant normative shifts in international
relations since the creation of the UN in 1945” (2011: 45). This is a peculiar argument, given
that the main critique of R2P has been that it does not play a role at the UN and in states’ for-
eign policies (see below), which are dominated by other concerns, and so does not change
anything substantively.
5. To be sure, this initiative can be also defended on cosmopolitan grounds (see Pattison 2016).
6. See e.g. Hehir (2010; 2012; 2013; 2016) and Morris (2013). I will again offer a brief overview of
the debate, rather than focusing in detail on the claims of particular scholars.
7. See e.g. Bellamy (2015a; 2015b), Glanville (2016), and Welsh (2013; 2014).
8. That said, there is some evidence of a historical sense of international responsibility to inter-
vene (see Glanville 2013). But this is not more clearly or forthrightly stated in the central
doctrines of humanitarian intervention, such as that espoused by Tony Blair in his fam-
ous ‘Doctrine of the International Community’ speech in 1999, than in R2P. See http://​
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/​+/​www.number10.gov.uk/​Page1297.
9. Ambitious alternatives to R2P are also rejected by Bellamy (2015a: 74–​82).
 The “Responsibility to Protect” and IPT    341

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Glanville, L. (2013). Gaddafi and Grotius: Some Historical Roots of the Libyan Intervention.
Global Responsibility to Protect 5(3): 342–​61.
Glanville, L. (2016). Does R2P Matter? Interpreting the Impact of a Norm. Cooperation and
Conflict 51(2): 184–​99.
Hehir, A. (2010). The Responsibility to Protect: “Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing”?
International Relations 24(2): 218–​39.
Hehir, A. (2012). The Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of Humanitarian
Intervention (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Hehir, A. (2013). The Permanence of Inconsistency: Libya, the Security Council, and the
Responsibility to Protect. International Security 38(1): 137–​59.
Hehir, A. (2016). Assessing the Influence of the Responsibility to Protect on the UN Security
Council during the Arab Spring. Cooperation and Conflict 51(2): 166–​83.
Holzgrefe, J. L., and R. O. Keohane (eds) (2003). Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and
Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) (2001). The
Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre).
Morris, J. (2013). Libya and Syria: R2P and the Spectre of the Swinging Pendulum. International
Affairs 89(5): 1265–​83.
Orford, A. (2011). International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Paris, R. (2014). The “Responsibility to Protect” and the Structural Problems of Preventative
Humanitarian Intervention. International Peacekeeping 21(3): 569–​603.
Pattison, J. (2016). The Ethics of “Responsibility While Protecting”: Brazil, the Responsibility
to Protect, and the Restrictive Approach to Humanitarian Intervention. In K. M. Kenkel and
P. Cunliffe (eds), Brazil as a Rising Power: Intervention Norms and the Contestation of Global
Order (London: Routledge), 104–​26.
342   James Pattison

Tesón, F. R. (1997). Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, 2nd edn
(New York: Transnational).
Walzer, M. (1980). The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics. Philosophy &
Public Affairs 9(3): 209–​29.
Welsh, J. M. (2013). Norm Contestation and the Responsibility to Protect. Global Responsibility
to Protect 5(4): 365–​96.
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 ­c hapter 26

M ulticultu ra l i sm a nd
Women’s Ri g h ts

Denise Walsh

In 2013, several Paris suburbs erupted in violence in response to abusive police and vigi-
lante enforcement of the French “burqa ban.” The ban, passed in 2010, prohibited the
covering of the face in public and targeted Muslim women’s face veils. French politicians
across the political spectrum and many French feminists supported the ban. Among
their justifications for the law was that Muslim men force Muslim women to wear the
veils and that the government must protect women’s rights. In contrast, most inter-
national human rights organizations and many Muslim women opposed the ban, argu-
ing that women choose to wear the face veil and have the right to express their cultural
identity and religious beliefs in public.
Over recent decades, conflicts like the burqa ban have multiplied. Indeed, Muslim
women’s dress is just one issue among many—​including female genital cutting, poly­
gyny, and dowry—​generating widespread controversy. Islamophobia and the greatest
refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War suggest that these controversies are
likely to persist. Given rising xenophobia, the backlash against multiculturalism, and
feminist nationalism, conventional scholarly queries about how to promote national
unity amidst diversity or how to resolve conflicts between multiculturalism and
women’s rights are now dated. Instead, the times call for new questions.
To advance a research agenda revitalized by contemporary events yet informed by
existing scholarship, this chapter assesses four approaches to multiculturalism and
women’s rights: liberal multiculturalism, liberal feminism, deliberative democracy, and
postcolonial feminism. Throughout, it draws on related empirical evidence to evaluate
the claims of each approach. That evidence suggests that much of the research on multi-
culturalism and women’s rights overemphasizes culture and neglects how “minority
women”—​meaning those who are located at the intersection of multiculturalism and
women’s rights—​are constructed as a group, represented by media and politicians, and
experience citizenship. The chapter concludes by proposing new research questions for
scholars studying multiculturalism and women’s rights.
344   Denise Walsh

Liberal Multiculturalism
vs Liberal Feminism

International Political Theory (IPT) research on multiculturalism and women’s rights

grapples with real-​world politics by addressing policy conflicts like the burqa ban.1
Scholars analysing these conflicts aim to promote justice, but they disagree about
what culture does, the purpose of justice, and how liberal democracies should secure
it. Liberal multiculturalists believe that governments should guarantee the individual
autonomy of minority group members and preserve national unity, hence they argue
that liberal democracies should embrace multiculturalism; liberal feminists believe that
governments should secure equality for all citizens, hence they argue that liberal dem-
ocracies should embrace women’s rights.
Multiculturalism emerged during the early 1970s in both Canada and Australia as
ethnic and national minorities called for state accommodation of group difference.
Women, as well as sexual, religious, and racial minorities, soon followed. These groups
advocated government policies such as multicultural education for all citizens and cul-
tural, economic, and political reform to alleviate bias and discrimination.
Liberal multiculturalists promote policies that secure the cultural recognition of
ethno-​nationalist minorities. Kymlicka (1995) argues that liberal governments must
respect the cultural differences of “societal cultures”—​meaning non-​immigrant groups
who share values, memories, institutions, practices, and language, and who live in con-
centrated geographic areas—​as these cultures are the touchstone of individual identity
and autonomy. If widespread respect for a societal culture is lacking, then individual
members will lack self-​respect through no fault of their own, and will not be able to fash-
ion a good life. Liberal democracies must therefore adopt multiculturalism.
Liberal multiculturalists argue, further, that multiculturalism is critical for sustain-
ing the unity of liberal democratic multination states. Kymlicka, citing the research of
Connor (1972) on the Québécois and Peterson (1975) on the Flemish in Belgium, rea-
sons that, as both of these groups assiduously resist assimilation, “members of liberal
cultures do value their cultural membership” (p. 88, emphasis original). He concludes
that liberal democracies must therefore accommodate ethno-​national attachments to
avoid “alienation and secessionist movements” (p. 185).
Liberal feminists like Okin (1999) and Nussbaum (1999) challenge these claims,
arguing that many minority cultures are sexist. Okin asserts that most male leaders of
minority groups are not democratically elected or directly accountable to women, and
that they use cultural practices to entrench gender inequality. As a result, Okin suggests
that some women might be better off if their culture were to become “extinct” (p. 22).
While acknowledging Kymlicka’s insistence that minority groups in liberal democracies
must endorse women’s rights if they are to legitimately pursue cultural accommodation,
Okin counters that few are likely to do so as most are committed to maintaining cultural
practices that subordinate women (p. 13).
 Multiculturalism and Women’s Rights    345

Empirical research indicates that many minority groups—​ including ethno-​

nationalist, immigrant, and religious groups in liberal democracies—​practise sexist tra-
ditions. Burrage (2015), for example, finds that African immigrants in Britain degrade
the physical wellbeing of women and girls through female genital mutilation, while Kent
(2006) finds that fundamentalist Mormon leaders in the United States are unaccount-
able to women members and abuse their power. This research supports liberal feminist
claims that the injustice liberal democracies should remediate is not cultural misrecog-
nition by the majority but sexism among minorities. Liberal feminists therefore endorse
state enforcement of women’s rights over multiculturalism.

Deliberative Democracy

Okin’s claim that multiculturalism is bad for women launched a thousand ships seeking
resolutions to conflicts between multiculturalism and women’s rights. Those conflicts
appeared to multiply as advocates of cultural difference from across the globe sought
recognition by the “West” for Asian and other values (e.g. Bell 2000). In response, a
number of scholars drew on deliberative democratic theory (see Chapter 33) to develop
guidelines for negotiating between non-​liberal and liberal cultures, reasoning that the
process for redressing these conflicts would affect the legitimacy of the solution and its
implementation.2 The two types of deliberative democrats considered here, which I call
substantive and procedural, disagree about what culture is, what deliberation should
entail, and the purpose of adjudicating these conflicts.
Substantive democrats build upon the logic of Rawlsian (1987) overlapping con-
sensus, endorse liberal democratic values, and advocate cross-​cultural dialogue to
secure those values. Substantive democrats agree with Kymlicka that culture is a cru-
cial source of individual identity, meaning that culture deserves respect. Substantive
democrats contend, however, that the task for liberal democracies is not to mandate
multiculturalism, but to encourage groups to engage in cross-​cultural dialogues that
produce a liberal consensus. The aim, as Parekh (2008: 170) describes it, is to encour-
age “mutual understanding, expand sympathy and imagination, exchange not only
arguments but also sensibilities to get both parties to take a critical look at themselves,
build up mutual trust, and arrive at a more just and balanced view.” Parkeh offers a
scripted example of how a cross-​cultural dialogue between the West and Muslim soci-
eties might proceed. In his scenario, the two groups speak frankly about the legacies of
Western colonialism and reactionary Islamic responses to the West. Through this pro-
cess, each gains the capacity for self-​critique and greater understanding of the other.
This cross-​cultural dialogue includes the discovery of overlapping consensus on
women’s rights. Parekh illustrates this by pointing to Muslims in Europe, explaining that
gender equality is advancing as Muslim women increasingly participate in formal polit-
ics, succeed in higher education, pursue careers, and in some cases become Islamic fem-
inists (2008: 110–​11). This suggests that Muslim culture—​like all cultures—​is dynamic,
346   Denise Walsh

and that policy-​makers would be wise to engage in cross-​cultural dialogue to affirm

areas of agreement on women’s rights. Substantive democrats thus align with Kymlicka,
as the latter argues that minority groups deserve respect but must be willing to adopt lib-
eral norms; substantive democrats offer a deliberative means for this adoption rooted in
mutual respect.
In contrast, Habermasian (1990) discourse ethics and its feminist critics (e.g. Fraser
1992) inspire procedural democrats. Rather than seeking “mutual understanding,”
procedural democrats aim for communicative transparency to reveal political inter-
ests and inclusiveness to address power inequalities (e.g. Deveaux 2006; Song 2007).
Their aim is to generate “contextually appropriate solutions to the problem at hand,”
and unlike substantive democrats, they accept solutions that diverge from liberal
norms and values (Song 2007: 84). While procedural democrats agree with the sub-
stantive democratic claim that culture is dynamic, they go beyond it by arguing that
culture is constructed through “social interaction and political struggle,” thereby con-
ceptualizing cultures as mutually constitutive and internally divided (Song 2005: 474).
This understanding informs their commitment to inclusivity and explicit discussion of
interests.
Deveaux (2006), for example, discusses how a procedural approach unfolded in
South Africa during policy negotiations over customary marriage reform. Deliberation
included chiefs, politicians, rural women, and feminist organizations. All engaged in
political speech, meaning that their interests were obvious and contestable. Deveaux
argues that this generated unanticipated areas for compromise. For example, the 1998
Recognition of Customary Marriage Act not only ensured that customary marriages
(including those that were polygynous) would be legally recognized for the first time
in South Africa; it also required men who took an additional wife to secure the financial
interests of their first wife in a written contract. While no parties were satisfied with all
aspects of the law, Deveaux argues that everyone gained. Moreover, she contends that
the inclusiveness of the process lent the outcome legitimacy.
Procedural democrats like Deveaux who attend to interests and inequality share
important affinities with liberal feminists like Okin, who argue that cultural claims are a
mask for elite males to entrench their power. Unlike liberal feminists, however, proced-
ural democrats argue that this does not mean that all non-​liberal cultures are sexist and
should become extinct, but instead, that all those affected by the issue should engage in
deliberation about their interests, seek resolutions to their differences, and that those
resolutions should be contextually appropriate rather than necessarily liberal.
Liberal multiculturalists, liberal feminists, and deliberative democrats disagree about
how to conceptualize culture and the purpose of justice, and thus how to resolve con-
flicts between multiculturalism and women’s rights. They also prioritize different mech-
anisms for redressing conflicts between multiculturalism and women’s rights: state
enforcement or deliberation. Nonetheless, they all agree that conflicts between multi-
culturalism and women’s rights are inevitable, and that liberal democracies must resolve
them. Postcolonial feminists challenge these claims.
 Multiculturalism and Women’s Rights    347

Postcolonial Feminism vs Liberal

Multiculturalism and Substantive
Democracy

Postcolonial feminists do not insist that liberal democracies must resolve conflicts
between multiculturalism and women’s rights; instead, they argue that these conflicts
are products of liberal misconceptions that must be disassembled. To that end, they offer
a framework for analysing how groups, including minority women, are constructed,
represented, and experience citizenship. Postcolonial feminists accuse liberal multi-
culturalists and substantive democrats of mischaracterizing and misusing culture in
their quest to make minority cultural groups safe for liberal democracies. Scholars like
Dhamoon (2009) and Volpp (2001) argue that liberal multiculturalists and substan-
tive democrats treat cultures as internally homogeneous and distinct, meaning that
they ignore inequalities of power within and among cultural groups. Consider Parekh’s
cross-​cultural dialogue. He presents dominant cultural idioms of the West and Islam as
bounded and diverging. Yet the United States and Muslim societies have entwined his-
tories of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and sexism critical for understanding both US
jingoism and Islamic fundamentalism (e.g. Grewal 2005; Abu-​Lughod 2013). Further,
Parekh’s references to US power undermine his claim that the West and Islam are cultur-
ally separate. Instead, his references point to political inequalities that hegemonic liberal
democracies have exploited by intervening in and invading Muslim majority coun-
tries while terrorizing Muslim minority communities at home (e.g. Abu-​Lughod 2013;
Razack 2004; Dhamoon and Abu-​Laban 2009).
Parekh’s proposed dialogue also sidesteps internal power differentials within these cul-
tural communities. Although he gestures toward that heterogeneity, Parekh treats main-
stream claims as representative of the group and assumes that the validation of liberal
norms is the appropriate aim of dialogue. Feminists, including postcolonial feminists
like Anthias (2002) and Volpp (2001), argue that privileging mainstream claims can have
severe costs for women. Ethno-​nationalist leaders who appeal to cultural authenticity,
for example, often reject feminism as Western imperialism, placing women in the pos-
ition of having to choose between their culture or their rights (Shachar 2001). Moreover,
negotiations between liberal democracies and minority group leaders frequently result
in bargains that deepen women’s oppression (e.g. Song 2005). Parekh’s focus on domin-
ant cultural idioms and cross-​cultural dialogues appear to invite similar results.
Post-​colonial feminists charge liberal multiculturalists and substantive democrats
not only with mischaracterizing culture but also with misusing culture by assuming that
it is the fountainhead of individual identity and autonomy, and thus concluding that lib-
eral democracies must respect cultural difference. Unlike Kymlicka, scholars like Arneil
(2007) and Dhamoon (2009) contend that cultural commitments as well as individual
identity is plural, interlocking, and can be crosscutting.
348   Denise Walsh

In contrast to the primordialist scholars Kymlicka cites, recent empirical research

confirms that ethno-​cultural identity is not always salient, that it may be trumped by
other identities, and that when salient it is contingent upon a variety of factors. Indeed,
ethno-​cultural claims may fail to win adherents even when cultural claims appear highly
salient. Consider Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. In 1997, Romanians in
Cluj, which is home to a sizeable Hungarian minority, elected a “radically nationalist
and vitriolically anti-​Hungarian mayor” (Brubaker et al. 2006: 5). Factors contributing
to the likelihood of ethnic conflict included an ethnically divided media, a weak civil
society, a powerful Hungarian nationalist party, and a stagnant economy. Following a
series of local skirmishes over ethno-​national symbols that echoed past clashes, the local
Romanian and Hungarian response to the mayor was “considerable indifference” (p. 5).
Ethno-​national identities also must compete with other identities, including other
cultural identities. In Kenya and Zambia, for instance, individuals have many identities
that are not coterminous with one ethno-​national group, such as religion, race, lan-
guage, tribe, clan, and region. Posner (2007) finds that individual loyalties to these iden-
tities fluctuate when the national electoral system changes, as individuals vote according
to the identity that will best secure them resources from the state. Group subjectivity also
can shift from one type of identity to another. Indians in Latin America called them-
selves peasants and mobilized on the basis of class during much of the twentieth cen-
tury; today, they call themselves indigenous and mobilize on the basis of culture. Yashar
(2005) explains that Indian subjectivity altered as neoliberal citizenship regimes politi-
cized culture over class, hence the salience of group cultural identity varied over time.
Empirical research also suggests that political entrepreneurs and external shocks
shape the salience of cultural identity. Scholars find that ethno-​national appeals pre-
vail when ambitious group leaders tell a convincing story that capitalizes not only on
national politics but also on international events such as the fall of the Soviet Union
(e.g. Beissinger 2002; Brubaker et al. 2006). If individuals experience culture as the well-
spring of their identity, it is in part because political entrepreneurs have successfully
activated that sense of self by offering a compelling narrative that exploits government
policies and external change.
Given these realities, postcolonial feminists do not argue that liberal democracies
must respect cultural difference. Instead, they argue that liberal democracies must rem-
edy the injustices committed against minority groups—​injustices that that these regimes
often perpetuate or enable. As Jung explains, “the appropriate question [ . . . ] is not ‘how
can democratic governments accommodate the pre-​existing and deeply held cultural
commitments of their citizens?’ but instead ‘how should democratic institutions process
the political claims that arise to protect and contest the exclusions and inclusions set in
place by the modern state itself?’ ” (2008: 21). From this vantage point liberal multicul-
turalism is inadequate, as “the dominant group within the state sets the terms of the
agenda for participation by minority ethnic groups and involves a bounded dialogue
where the premises themselves may not be open to negotiation” (Anthias 2002: 279).
Accordingly, minority ethnic groups require political power so that they can challenge
discrimination and advance their own agenda, which may not be liberal.
 Multiculturalism and Women’s Rights    349

The evidence suggests that minority groups agree. Postero (2007) chronicles how,
after liberal multiculturalist reforms in Bolivia during the 1990s granted Indians equal
citizenship and recognition, thousands of Aymara Indians led cross-​racial and class
coalitions in a 2003 uprising known as the Gas War. The Aymara rejected multicul-
tural reforms and demanded greater control over land, improved access to economic
resources and social goods, and the nationalization of the gas industry. They wanted
state responsiveness to, not respect for, Indian values. Or consider the Mohawk Nation,
which rejects multicultural policies in favour of indigenous sovereignty because the lat-
ter challenges both the cultural hegemony of the Canadian majority and its refusal to
acknowledge indigenous dispossession (Simpson 2014). These examples indicate that
indigenous peoples demand remedies beyond cultural recognition. They also suggest
that liberal democracies maintain their rule over minority cultural groups by using
multiculturalism to deflect their more radical demands.
Instead of theorizing cultural difference and how to resolve conflicts between multi-
culturalism and women’s rights, postcolonial feminists like Anthias (2002) and Yuval-​
Davis (2006) theorize the processes that produce injustice for marginalized groups.
Yuval-​Davis (2006) suggests that scholars analyse how institutions, interactions among
people, as well as media and political representations of groups generate social divisions
like gender, class, and ethnicity, and that they study how people experience citizenship
as a result. This analytical framework can help scholars to explain how and why many
minority men as well as majority women have more power, status, and wealth than
minority women, and how these inequalities facilitate conflicts between multicultural-
ism and women’s rights.
Consider Radcliffe’s (2015) application of this framework, which she calls “postco-
lonial intersectionality.”3 Radcliffe discusses how a conflict between multiculturalism
and women’s rights emerged in Ecuador among the Tsáchila people, and why it was a
dead end for Tsáchila women. She compares two development projects. In the first, aid
workers concerned about sexist indigenous norms urged Tsáchila women to recog-
nize that their interests as women clashed with their culture, and to confront Tsáchila
men (p. 167). The men won that confrontation: the reconfigured project targeted male
youth for empowerment. In the second project, indigenous women organized a train-
ing school “in which culture, femininity, and empowerment acquire meanings” defined
by indigenous women (p. 169). The school enhanced women’s public engagement.
The implication is that liberals manufacture conflicts between multiculturalism and
women’s rights when they urge minority women to attack their culture and deny them
the ability to set the terms of political engagement. Radcliffe’s comparison suggests that
indigenous women can avoid these conflicts and increase their power by reinterpreting
their culture as they see fit.
Liberal multiculturalists and substantive democrats begin with culture and argue
that liberal democracies should respect it. The evidence suggests that they have over-
emphasized the significance of cultural identity, and that liberal governments have used
multiculturalism as a tool to contain the groups they purport to respect. Alternatively,
postcolonial feminists begin by investigating how groups such as “indigenous women”
350   Denise Walsh

are constructed, represented, and experience citizenship. Applying this analytical

framework, postcolonial feminists argue that liberals manufacture conflicts between
multiculturalism and women’s rights, and that minority women can sidestep these con-
flicts while also enhancing their public participation.

Postcolonial Feminism vs Liberal

Feminism and Procedural Democracy

Postcolonial feminists criticize liberal feminists who believe that minority women are
victims of their culture or that women’s rights will save them. Postcolonial feminists also
disagree with procedural democrats, as the latter fail to problematize the central role
culture plays in their analysis of minority women’s subordination. Postcolonial femin-
ists contend that liberal feminists, much like liberal multiculturalists and substantive
democrats, misuse and mischaracterize culture, and that liberal feminists also reify the
category “women” to their own benefit.
Postcolonial feminists argue that liberal feminists mischaracterize culture as bad for
women by ignoring the fact that a range of cultural interpretations are possible (e.g.
Abu-​Lughod 2013; Volpp 2001). While libertarians, for example, interpret state inter-
vention to advance women’s rights as a violation of liberalism, liberal feminists argue
that only through such interventions can liberalism live up to its promise of equality for
all (e.g. Kukathas 2003; Okin 1989). Indeed, many feminists draw upon principles cen-
tral to their cultural traditions, such as individual autonomy or the equality of all human
beings in the eyes of God, to challenge women’s subordination (e.g. Okin 1989; Sunder
2003). These examples suggest that every culture offers pitfalls and opportunities for
feminists, and that many selectively reinterpret cultural norms and values to advance
gender justice.
Postcolonial feminists also charge liberal feminists with misusing culture by exclu-
sively focusing on cultural practices as the cause of non-​liberal women’s subordination.
Liberal feminists do not attribute violence against women in India, for example, to the
interaction of heteronormativity and capitalism. Instead, they target dowry, which
requires a woman to provide consumer goods to her spouse upon marriage (e.g. Kapur
2002; Narayan 1997). The marketization of the Indian economy has increased demands
for larger dowries; some men covet a woman’s dowry more than the woman (Kapur
2002). In extreme cases this has led to femicide. Liberal feminists like Bunch (1997)
respond by attacking dowry alone, succumbing to cultural determinism. Or consider
liberal feminist attacks on female genital cutting (FGC) as practised by African immi-
grants in Europe. Liberal feminists neglect the racial discrimination facing African
immigrant women in employment, housing, or social services (e.g. Burrage 2015; Levin
1999; Rahman and Toubia 2000; cf. Wade 2012). Racism intensifies African women’s
dependence on African men and the immigrant community, contributing to their
 Multiculturalism and Women’s Rights    351

willingness to participate in and value FGC (e.g. Bassel 2010). Empirical researchers
also find that Europeans indulge in cultural racism by concluding that patriarchal prac-
tices that differ from their own prove that the minority group is uncivilized. In response,
some members of minority groups—​including women—​defend their group’s patri-
archal practices (e.g. Bowen 2010; Rottmann and Ferree 2008).
According to postcolonial feminists, liberal feminist misuse of culture coupled with
a reification of the category “women” empowers liberal feminists, not minority women.
Liberal feminists often imagine “women” as coterminous with white, bourgeois,
Western women who appear to “have no culture” (e.g. Narayan 2004; Volpp 2001: 1192).
Liberal feminist organizations thus promote the interests of this advantaged subgroup
of women while marginalizing minority women (e.g. Predelli, Halsaa, and Thun 2012).
International organizations are susceptible to a similar critique, as their embrace of lib-
eral feminism prompts them to promote women into existing power structures that best
serve advantaged subgroups of women (e.g. Arat 2015).
Postcolonial feminists also charge liberal feminists with being oblivious to the costs
of liberal hegemony. Scholars like Bunch (1997) and Nussbaum (1999) reason that they
have a duty to act on behalf of their disadvantaged sisters given their liberal advan-
tages. Organizations like the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), following this logic,
promoted US military intervention in Afghanistan to save Afghani women from the
Taliban. Postcolonial feminists, however, insist that liberal feminist agency does not
stem from the virtues of liberalism. Instead, it is rooted in racism and neoliberalism
that advantage white, bourgeois women by providing them with unparalleled access to
resources such as education, technology, and security obtained through the exploitation
of the world’s poor and discriminatory gatekeeping (e.g. Kapur 2002; Mohanty, Russo,
and Torres 1991). The history of liberalism lends some credence to postcolonial femin-
ist claims, as it is deeply gendered, classed, and raced (e.g. Pateman 1988; Sangari 2002);
further, neoliberalism has disproportionately benefited white elites in liberal democra-
cies (e.g. Harvey 2005).
Liberal feminists rarely attack these global inequalities with the same gusto that
they attack sexist, non-​liberal cultural practices. The Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which spent decades advocating for Afghani women,
rightly noted that the FMF ignored the complicity of the United States in contributing to
the plight of Afghani women through its support of the Taliban (Farrell and McDermott
2005: 49–​50). By insisting that women’s rights conflict with non-​liberal cultures, liberal
feminists suggest that women’s rights also conflict with racial and global justice, and that
liberal feminists consider the latter less important. Not surprisingly, some women reject
feminism in favour of cultural claims that often include rhetoric attacking US hegem-
ony, cultural racism, and neoliberalism (e.g. Narayan 1997).
Postcolonial feminists are not persuaded by the arguments of procedural democrats
either. Certainly scholars like Song and Deveaux avoid essentializing culture; they also
acknowledge inequalities of power within cultural communities. However, by focus-
ing on conflicts between multiculturalism and women’s rights, procedural democrats
overemphasize culture to the detriment of other factors, such as racism (e.g. Anthias
352   Denise Walsh

2002). Thus, like liberal feminists, procedural democrats attribute the “vulnerability”
of minority women to culture (Deveaux 2006). To be sure, procedural democrats do
not propose to save minority women from their culture; instead, they propose delib-
eration and the forging of a consensus among all affected, including minority women.
Yet it is unclear how a group that is subordinate to both the majority and minority men
might participate equally in deliberation. Deveaux cites the case of customary marriage
reform in South Africa as exemplary. However, that deliberative process legalized pol-
ygyny despite strong opposition by the Rural Women’s Movement. A consensus among
political actors was forged, but it was hardly a compromise among equals. Ultimately,
the new legislation passed with limited input from rural women (Albertyn et al. 1999).
Concerned with resolving an apparently inevitable conflict, procedural democrats over-
look the possibility that minority women can dissolve these conflicts by reinterpreting
their culture, and that they are rarely able to do so given their political marginalization
both in their own communities and in liberal democracies.
From the vantage point of postcolonial feminists, labelling the relationship between
multiculturalism and women’s rights a conflict mischaracterizes and misuses culture,
and reifies the category women. Empirical evidence suggests that postcolonial fem-
inist claims have traction: culture is dynamic, internally contested, and shot through
with power; although many people value their culture, ethno-​nationalist attachments
not only are malleable, they are one among many identities. Minority groups there-
fore may seek greater political power over recognition. Minority women, who often
find themselves caught between hostile majorities and patriarchal minority leaders,
sometimes choose to honour their culture by reinterpreting it, rejecting the protec-
tion offered them by scholars and politicians while simultaneously avoiding conflicts
between multiculturalism and women’s rights. By honouring their culture they chal-
lenge liberal democratic imperialism, racism, and neoliberalism; by reinterpreting
it they challenge patriarchal minority leaders and the multiculturalism these leaders
often deploy.

Policy Conflicts
between Multiculturalism
and Women’s Rights

Given rising nationalism, pervasive global migration (see Chapter 39), resistance to
multiculturalism, and a vocal cadre of feminists committed to national interests, pol-
icy conflicts between multiculturalism and women’s rights are likely to persist. For
IPT scholars who aim to grapple with these problems, one way forward would be to
study how minority women are constructed, are represented, and experience citizen-
ship. Scholars are just beginning to investigate multiculturalism and women’s rights
 Multiculturalism and Women’s Rights    353

through the lens of what Radcliffe calls “postcolonial intersectionality.” This research,
focusing almost exclusively on Muslim women in Europe, analyses the reification of
“Muslim women” and finds that they are misrepresented in the media and in politics,
and that they are marginalized citizens. For example, Dutch politicians frame Muslim
women as outsiders and at the same time as victims of their culture; they also “exclude,
delegitimize, and otherwise marginalize Muslim women’s voices” (Korteweg and
Triadafilopoulos 2013; Severs, Celis, and Meier 2013: 432). This has led some scholars
to argue that integrating Muslim women’s voices into the policy-​making process will
not suffice, as majority politicians only listen when these women confirm that Islam is
oppressive (Bassel and Emejulu 2010). Many empirical questions about multicultural-
ism and women’s rights still remain. Scholars focus overwhelmingly on Islam, yet reli-
gion is distinct from culture, and growing Islamophobia means that Muslim experiences
in liberal democracies may not be representative of most minority groups. Further,
few systematic comparative analyses of policy conflicts between multiculturalism and
women’s rights exist, meaning that little is known about similarities and differences
among them, how and why they emerge, or their effects on popular attitudes toward
migration, nationalism, and feminism.
When, why, and how do some issues get framed as conflicts between multicultur-
alism and women’s rights while others do not? What other relationships between the
two might exist? Do different actors advocate different types of relationships between
these two sets of rights? As the burqa ban suggests, do national politicians inflame these
conflicts to win votes? Who dominates policy debates between multiculturalism and
women’s rights, how, and why? Some empirical research suggests that minority women
may resist these conflicts by reinterpreting their culture. Does this happen often? If so,
what are the normative implications for liberal democracies?
IPT scholars might also ask how, when, and why conflicts between multicultural-
ism and women’s rights are most likely to become entrenched. They could study Dutch
citizenship films, for instance, that confront aspiring Muslim citizens with images
of women bathing topless, or investigate how narratives about multiculturalism and
women’s rights shape individual cognitive processes, asking whether or not individ-
uals internalize conflicts between the two and become invested in a conflict narrative.
Scholars might also analyse what effects these conflicts have on popular attitudes toward
multiculturalism and women’s rights.
Instead of asking how liberal democracies should resolve conflicts between multicul-
turalism and women’s rights, IPT scholars might ask other normative questions. What,
for example, should liberal democracies do, given that minority women are reified, mis-
represented, and marginalized by liberal democratic politicians, international organiza-
tions, and national feminist organizations? How might liberal democracy become more
responsive to minority women? What would justice for minority women in liberal dem-
ocracies look like? Is it possible to imagine a mutually reinforcing relationship between
multiculturalism and women’s rights? What other relationships between multicultural-
ism and women’s rights might scholars theorize?
354   Denise Walsh

Conclusion

IPT scholars have engaged with real-​world politics by debating how to resolve conflicts
between multiculturalism and women’s rights. Postcolonial feminists argue, and empir-
ical research confirms, that these conflicts are not inevitable. Instead, they are perva-
sive in the scholarly literature because researchers often mischaracterize and misuse
culture. IPT scholars also disagree about what justice is for and how to get it. Although
many debate what would be just for minority groups and women members living in
liberal democracies, few have investigated the views of minority women and their strug-
gle to shape these debates in the real world. In the future, IPT scholars might research
minority women’s demands and participation in these conflicts; they might also study
how and why conflicts between multiculturalism and women’s rights emerge, and why
they sometimes do not. Finally, scholars might imagine new ways to advance justice for
minority women. IPT scholars can heed this call if they stop assuming that conflicts
between multiculturalism and women’s rights are inevitable.

Notes

1. Scholars of multiculturalism treat religious obligations and cultural commitments as inter-

changeable (e.g. Phillips 2007).
2. Several scholars did not take a deliberative democratic approach, notably Kukathas (2003),
Shachar (2001), and Phillips (2010).
3. Intersectionality is a theory for analysing social locations that are constituted by multiple,
overlapping forms of oppression within and between groups (e.g. Crenshaw 1989; Hill
Collins 1999). The terminology and application of intersectionality theory is contested (e.g.
Dhamoon 2011).

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 ­c hapter 27

The Hum an Ri g h t
to Health a nd t h e
Challenge of P ov e rt y

Patrick Hayden

The right to health is enshrined in international human rights treaties yet is widely com-
promised by global health disparities. Across the world, more than 2.2 billion people
live in conditions of multidimensional poverty, comprising lack of income, poor nutri-
tion, and inadequate sanitation and clean water, as well as structural barriers to access-
ing health resources (UNDP 2014: 3). Severe poverty has devastating consequences for
health. Approximately one third of all deaths each year are due to poverty-​related health
risks (malnutrition, unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene), and preventable com-
municable diseases (pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases, HIV/​AIDS, malaria, measles,
tuberculosis) (UNDP 2013; WHO 2015a: 14–​17). Globally, citizens of poorer countries
are disadvantaged in terms of mortality, life expectancy, health expenditure, and health
service coverage in comparison to the citizens of wealthier countries. The World Health
Organization (WHO) estimates, for instance, that at least 1.3 billion people lack access
to basic health services, and nearly a third of the global population—​including over half
of those living in Africa and Asia—​lack access to essential medicines (WHO 2011). The
mutually reinforcing cycle of poverty, inequality, and poor health affects the disease bur-
den around the world: low-​and middle-​income countries bear 93 per cent of the world’s
disease burden, yet account for only 18 per cent of world income and 11 per cent of global
health spending (WHO 2000: 7; 2013: 37).
This chapter considers legal, moral, and political articulations of the right to health,
alongside the challenges posed to health status by poverty and socioeconomic inequal-
ity. The first section traces the evolution of international concern with health as a basic
human right worthy of protection and fulfilment. Despite its uneven implementation
globally, the right to health is increasingly acknowledged as a justified claim on gov-
ernments to provide access to adequate health services and treatment. The second sec-
tion discusses two competing frameworks for conceptualizing the meaning and value
358   Patrick Hayden

of health—​a statist framing of securitization and a globalist framing of individual

entitlement—​as examples of how the right to health faces uncertainty associated with
current international policy decisions. Although health is often viewed by states as a
residual category of wider security interests, globalists contend that this view dimin-
ishes responsibility for the social determinants of health essential to enjoyment of the
right to health itself. The third section proposes an understanding of the right to health
in terms of recognition theory’s emphasis on the intersectional injustices of poverty and
inequality, which refers to the ways that material deprivation and social exclusion com-
pound each other. Analysing the right to health in these terms, I argue, should lead us
to think more expansively about the deleterious consequences of poverty and inequality
on the health, identity, and self-​respect of those who are not recognized as fully human
persons.

Health as a Basic Human Right

The right to health has assumed greater prominence on the social science agenda since
the early 2000s, driven by the concerns of scholars, policy-​makers, and social move-
ments about the adverse implications of globalization on economic and social rights.
Once considered “the neglected stepchildren of the human rights movement” (Farmer
2003: xxiv), socioeconomic rights now attract an enormous amount of writing, largely
centred on analysis of the pathways through which their realization can take place.
Despite this increasing interest in socioeconomic rights generally, study of the right
to health in particular remains surprisingly modest in International Political Theory
(IPT). The majority of analyses of health and human rights comes from the fields of
international law, health studies, sociology, bioethics, and philosophy. Norman Daniels
(2008) has formulated a modified Rawlsian account of just health policy, for example,
positing health care as central to the fair distribution of income, wealth, and opportun-
ities. Yet even for Daniels, health becomes a focus of justice only indirectly, insofar as
it matters for resource allocation and equality of opportunity. Similarly, Simon Caney
(2010) refers to the vital interests we have in the rights to life, health, and subsistence, but
attention to these rights is bounded by his overarching consideration of climate change.
Thus, IPT still has pressingly important contributions to make in clarifying both the
significance of the value of health for its own sake and the role that health plays as an
important dimension of human wellbeing within an international context.
While representing a variety of approaches and theories, current research on the right
to health turns, in essence, on the constituent norms of the international human rights
system. The idea that health is a human right was first articulated in the preamble to
the 1946 WHO constitution, and was subsequently included in Article 25(1) of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): “Everyone has the right to a stand-
ard of living adequate for the health and well-​being of himself and his family, includ-
ing food, clothing, housing and medical care.” The 1966 International Covenant on
 Health and the Challenge of Poverty    359

Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) also codifies “the right of everyone to
the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,” and
requires states parties to take steps individually and through international cooperation
to progressively realize this right, subject to “the maximum of their available resources.”
Such measures include the prevention, treatment, and control of epidemic diseases, the
provision of antenatal and neonatal primary care, and the creation of social conditions
to assure adequate medical attention to all. The principle of “progressive realization”
acknowledges that enjoyment of the right to health depends upon the circumstances
prevailing in any given context, as well as the need for states to prioritize the allocation
of scarce resources (financial, technological, natural, and organizational). Nonetheless,
states remain obligated to ensure the allocation of “adequate” resources to secure the
immediate “effective” implementation of the right to health—​including through inter-
national assistance—​while taking steps to develop health system capacities (UNHCHR
and WHO 2008).
The right to health is further codified in a number of other international human
rights instruments, and is frequently presented as part of a configuration of related
rights focused on alleviation of suffering and enhancement of wellbeing. For instance,
the Human Rights Committee—​the treaty monitoring body for the 1966 International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—​has broadly interpreted the right to life (Article
6) as requiring states to implement measures targeted at reducing infant mortality and
preventing malnutrition and epidemic disease (UNHRC 1982). The 1979 Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, noting that “in
situations of poverty women have the least access to food, health, education, training
and opportunities for employment and other needs” (Preamble), mandates that states
parties take steps to eliminate discrimination against women in the field of health care,
and to ensure equality of access to health care services, including those related to fam-
ily planning (Article 12). The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child confirms that
childhood is entitled to special care related specifically to “physical and mental health”
(Article 17), including the right to life and development (Article 6), and states are bound
to adopt measures to diminish infant and child mortality, ensure medical assistance and
primary health care, combat disease and malnutrition, provide clean drinking water,
and offer information and education related to health, nutrition, and sanitation (Article
24). Each of these instruments situates the right to health in relation to fundamental
principles of non-​discrimination and equality, emphasizing that the right to health is
mutually constitutive of a host of other human rights. In short, human life, wellbeing,
and dignity cannot survive in conditions of chronic poverty, economic and political
inequality, and neglect or denial of health services.
The human right to health is by its nature what Henry Shue calls a “basic right.” Rights
are “basic” if and when “enjoyment of them is essential to the enjoyment of all other
rights,” and they specify the “line beneath which no one is to be allowed to sink” (Shue
1996: 18–​19). Shue identifies security, liberty, and subsistence as mutually depend-
ent basic rights because they are constitutive of the fulfilment of every other right. The
correlative duties flowing from the three basic rights—​to avoid depriving individuals
360   Patrick Hayden

of their rights, to protect individuals from deprivation, and to aid the deprived (see
Chapter 41)—​are therefore necessary conditions for the effective exercise of all other
rights (Shue 1995: 52). The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights likewise
argues that the right to health is “indispensable for the exercise of other human rights”
(UNCESCR 2000: para. 1). Since an individual’s standard of health is of central import-
ance for the full enjoyment of all human rights, both socioeconomic and civil-​political,
characterizing the right to health as a basic right seems apt. This is especially clear when
considering how the right to health should be guaranteed for those facing “formidable
structural and other obstacles” (UNCESCR 2000: para. 5), such as poverty, inequality,
discrimination, and persistent burden of disease.
As a basic right, the right to health cuts across the traditional negative/​positive dichot-
omy often used to distinguish civil-​political and socioeconomic rights. On one hand it
refers to the right not to have one’s health harmed by acts that infringe upon one’s bodily
integrity, such as torture and medical experimentation. Yet security rights are jointly
necessary with basic subsistence rights, such as the provision of primary health care ser-
vices, safe drinking water, adequate food and sanitation, basic health education, repro-
ductive and child healthcare services, and access to essential medicines (UNCESCR
1990: para. 10). On the other hand, then, the right to health cannot be realized adequately
simply through non-​interference by the state. As a right to certain benefits and assist-
ance, it requires positive action to be taken in order to ensure access to health services,
treatment and support for all individuals, and for public health to be protected by suit-
able social measures. Failure to implement such measures implies deprivation of indi-
viduals’ life and wellbeing, and violation of states’ obligations to respect, promote, and
fulfil the right to health.

Health Security and the Social

Determinants of Health

Under closer scrutiny, however, the position of the right to health is more ambiguous
than international legal developments suggest. Conflicting pressures emerging from an
often polarized international health regime contribute to situating health at the heart of
a contradictory tension between statism and globalism. While states seek to maintain
comprehensive control over their borders in order to protect their populations from
exogenous health-​related risks and hazards (Amon 2014), they also face compelling pol-
itical pressures to promote policies improving health equity so that all individuals have
“secure access” (Pogge 2008: 71) to the right to health. Both aspects of “health security”
evidently are a good thing. Protection against threats to life, liberty, and physical secur-
ity is commonly acknowledged as a social good that states have a responsibility to pro-
vide for their citizens. Similarly, having secure access to the contents of basic rights to
subsistence and health care is also generally regarded as a social good. But it is a thornier
 Health and the Challenge of Poverty    361

question as to whether state duties to mitigate against threats (real or imagined) to pub-
lic health and security, or achieving effective individual rights to health and subsistence,
should be accorded priority in practice. As Shue (1996: 61) recognizes, the coercive pow-
ers of states to impose extensive security measures can have deleterious effects on indi-
vidual human rights.
While understandable as a pragmatic strategy to minimize a select population’s
exposure to contagion in an interconnected world, the statist security approach easily
turns into powerful foreign policy and economic considerations that benefit only a rela-
tively small number of people. This approach also functions to legitimize a reductive
picture of unitary global health threats that glosses over different vulnerabilities concen-
trated among the world’s poor. The United States and the United Kingdom, for example,
now directly reference infectious disease threats as central to their “smart power”
national security strategies (Nunes 2014). But the tendency to adopt reductive accounts
of what counts as a health threat is not simply a product of pragmatic strategizing by
states individually; it is also a reflection of the problematic recent development of a new
and extremely potent capacity for international health governance consolidated under
the generic umbrella of health security. Since the adoption of new international health
regulations in 2005, a coordinated system of global health regulation has emerged that
aims to define the objects and modalities of disease regulations beyond and between
states, and which prioritizes infectious diseases surveillance. In 2014 the US also spear-
headed the “Global Health Security Agenda,” an international mechanism comprising
more than thirty states and international organizations that seeks to “accelerate progress
toward a world safe and secure from infectious disease threats and to promote global
health security as an international security priority” (CDC 2015). This statist lens high-
lights the spectre of naturally occurring pandemics, such as the recent SARS, H1N1, and
Ebola epidemics, as well as intentional contagions resulting from bioterrorism and the
deliberate spread of viruses, germs, and pathogens. By reifying a heavily securitized
conception of health, this lens epitomizes a growing fear of “emerging” diseases and of
new risks “slanted towards the priorities of western nations” (Brown 2011: 324).
There is, then, a dramatic difference between two primary approaches to conceptu-
alizing global health which reflect divergent normative priorities, the power of agenda-​
setting, and the translation of ethical-​political principles into policy objectives and
health outcomes. The statist approach prioritizes the interests of states and their respect-
ive populations, and searches for new modes of diplomatic, economic, and foreign pol-
icy that strengthen the capacity of (some) states to respond to and control perceived
health risks. The globalist approach, in contrast, prioritizes the rights and interests of
individuals across all countries, and looks for new measures of health equality that sup-
port substantial values about interdependent basic rights and transnational mechan-
isms for enhancing health as a requisite to human wellbeing (Davies 2010). A globalist,
human rights approach thus indicates two conceptual and normative weaknesses of the
statist understanding of health. One is that the push by states in the global North to
strengthen infectious diseases surveillance out of a concern for discrete events charac-
terized as acute “emergencies” and “crises” justifies an extreme focus on epidemiological
362   Patrick Hayden

“risk management”—​ accentuating techniques of containment, quarantine, and

isolation—​rather than on long-​term expansion of adequate health and social infrastruc-
ture, improvements in living conditions, and treatment of non-​communicable ailments
afflicting the global South—​such as the preventable diarrhoeal diseases closely linked
with poverty from which millions of “vulnerable and socially disadvantaged people” die
every year (Kamradt-​Scott and McInnes 2012; WHO 2015b). Another weakness is that
the reductive conceptualization of health adopted by the statist approach, which views
health as a matter of “negative” security or survival from existential threats, brings with
it several disturbing implications (Brown and Stoeva 2014: 306). First, it masks the nor-
matively significant role that health plays in a broader picture of human wellbeing and
what it means to live a properly human life. Second, it equates the health interests of
individuals and the health interests of states, which do not necessarily overlap or con-
verge. Third, it reclassifies human rights violations as generic threats to physical secur-
ity, diverting attention from states’ obligations to promote basic socioeconomic rights.
Finally, it represents health issues in isolation from the multidimensional social con-
ditions that strongly shape patterns of individual and group health—​which are often
structured along the fault lines of poverty, inequality, and discrimination—​thereby
privileging respect for state sovereignty over respect for individual rights (Lakoff 2010).
Indeed, the rise of state control over public health in terms of transnational health
securitization has occurred at a time where the combination of neoliberal economic
policies, global terrorism and counterterrorism, and the post-​2008 global financial cri-
sis has eroded promotion and protection of socioeconomic rights.
The argument here is not that addressing “health security” is unimportant, since pro-
tection from disease is beneficial, but that prioritizing securitization skews the referent
object of health needs, privileges only a small proportion of threats to health, and reflects
the narrow concerns of the most powerful and wealthy states (Rushton 2011: 782–​4). The
central issue at stake is that health is far more than survival from existential threats; it
is also about the quality and condition of existence itself. The enjoyment of the highest
attainable standard of health is integral to living with dignity, to cultivating personal
agency, to participating in the life of one’s social, political, and economic communities,
and to exercising a full spectrum of valued rights and liberties. When health is under-
stood as a vital interest of all individuals, both as a positive state of human wellbeing and
as a basic right necessary to the exercise of all other human rights, it follows that health
is not merely instrumental to statist ends but has an intrinsic value. Consequently, over
the past decade movement towards a globalist approach to the poverty–​health nexus has
positioned the interpretation of health as an individual entitlement within the broader
framework of the underlying systemic and socioeconomic determinants of health. This
echoes the definition of the right to health in the WHO Constitution, couched in terms
of the “enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health [ . . . ] without distinction
of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.” The ICESCR similarly
frames the right to health as a guarantee of “the highest attainable standard of physical
and mental health,” foregrounding a socially expansive view of health and the role of
non-​medical social factors in contributing to health inequalities.
 Health and the Challenge of Poverty    363

According to the authoritative interpretation offered by the UN Committee on

Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comment 14 (UNCESCR 2000: para.
12), the right to health contains four “interrelated and essential elements” which apply
to health care, public health, and the social determinants of health. In fulfilling the right
to health, states have an obligation not only to protect individuals from interference
with their enjoyment of this right, but also to take social measures that ensure health
goods, services, and facilities are (1) available in sufficient quantity; (2) accessible to
everyone without discrimination, including being affordable and geographically access-
ible; (3) acceptable, including ethically, culturally and with respect to privacy; and (4) of
good quality and scientifically appropriate. Particular emphasis is placed on concep-
tualizing the underlying social determinants of health as supra-​individual factors that
strongly influence realization of the right to health itself. Such determinants include
safe and potable water; safe and nutritious food; sanitation; housing; occupational and
environmental hygiene; health information and education; employment and economic
opportunities; gender and racial equality; and social inclusion. Anchoring the right to
health in its underlying social determinants means it is not to be construed as a right to
be “healthy.” Rather, it is “a right to the enjoyment of a variety” of diagnostic, curative,
and preventive “facilities, goods, services and conditions necessary for the realization
of the highest attainable standard of health” (UNCESCR 2000: para. 9). The evolving
social determinants paradigm gained further momentum as a basis for universal health
norms when the WHO established the Commission on Social Determinants of Health
(CSDH) in 2005. In its final report published in 2008, the CSDH recommended shared
domestic and global responsibility to address three core health areas going forward: (1)
improving the daily living conditions in which individuals are born, grow, live, work,
and age; (2) tackling the “deeper social structures and processes” that shape those con-
ditions, specifically the inequitable distribution of power, wealth, and resources within
and across countries; and (3) researching and measuring the multidimensional causal
factors that undermine health outcomes and health equity (CSDH 2008: 202–​6). In
this way, the social determinants paradigm extends beyond the traditional biomedical
model of health—​understood as the absence of physical disease or defect irrespective of
contributing social factors—​exploited by the statist approach. More broadly, it reminds
us that health is not merely about having or not having certain things, but more import-
antly about the quality and condition of a broad spectrum of social arrangements that
protect, promote, or restore each individual’s capability to be healthy (Sen 2002).

Poverty and the Right to Health

through the Lens of Recognition

From a human rights perspective, an emphasis on the social determinants of health is

appealing because it focuses attention on the need to adopt broad measures to counteract
364   Patrick Hayden

patterns of poverty and inequality precipitating global health inequities, and to direct
such interventions to the most marginalized and vulnerable communities. Strong cor-
relations exist between poverty, inequality in access to the social determinants of health,
and the forms of vulnerability that deepen and perpetuate conditions of poor health
amongst lowest income groups worldwide. Moreover, health inequalities are exacerbated
by social discrimination and political exclusion on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender,
sexual orientation, religion, and language. These linkages suggest that social, economic,
political, and health status are co-​determined. While material deprivations deeply affect
the ability of the poor to obtain services and conditions necessary for the realization of
the highest attainable standard of health, my claim here is that inequalities of power, sta-
tus, and political voice are also constitutive of the experience of persistent health inequal-
ities as a global phenomenon. As a consequence, health inequalities are partly rooted
in a reluctance to acknowledge the social determinants of health inequalities and their
situational specificity for marginalized individuals and groups subject to unequal social
relationships of poverty, discrimination, and stigmatization—​a reluctance that may be
overlooked by an overly narrow resource-​distribution paradigm. A more effective and
normatively compelling approach to the ongoing struggle for the right to health, I shall
argue, focuses attention on how routine forms of misrecognition, alongside maldistribu-
tion, diminish the human status of those most vulnerable to health disparities.
To better understand why inequalities of status, power, and voice, in addition to mater-
ial scarcity, translate into health deprivations, it is helpful to turn to a “recognition the-
ory” approach to human rights that allows us to see human rights as sites of political
struggle over what makes us the same and what makes us different from one another—​
struggles, in other words, for due recognition of our always precarious human status.
While the prevailing view about human rights in international relations relies upon the
presumption of a presocial rights-​bearing subject whose inherent dignity transcends
the various contexts in which deprivation occurs, recognition theories highlight the dis-
tinctive forms of power and status that condition the lives of embodied individuals and
groups, and the historically and politically situated nature of rights claims emerging from
social struggles against injustice. This has the benefit of bringing back into view the spe-
cifically political dimension of human rights—​that is, the ways that human rights claims
are catalysed by the experiences of disrespect, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness
inextricably bound up with the many dimensions of material and social disadvantage.
A recognition approach articulates the situatedness of human rights as political claims
to a fully human status that we acquire through our constitutive social relationships.
The ability to exercise rights is dependent not only upon the juridical enshrinement of
rights in positive law, but even more fundamentally upon the existence of intersubjective
relations through which individuals acquire their sense of identity, self-​confidence, self-​
respect, and self-​esteem as states of wellbeing (Honneth 1995). This contrasts with the
conventional “liberal consensus” on human rights (Evans 2002: 199), which reflects an
overly abstract understanding of “inalienable” rights as possessed by all human beings
simply in virtue of their humanity and independently of all forms of social recognition.
Yet human dignity is not simply an inherent or natural fact; it is a sociopolitical condition
 Health and the Challenge of Poverty    365

that comes from being recognized by another as human (see Chapter 46). Dignity, in
other words, is an interpersonal status acquired by intersubjective means of equal recog-
nition acknowledging due respect for the worth and particularity of others. Proponents
of the notion of inherent rights might argue that a recognition theory of rights is unable
to provide a satisfactory account of the (intrinsic) worth of human beings, and thus is
unable to offer a secure normative foundation for critiquing injustice. A recognition
theory of rights can counter, however, that intrinsic moral worth itself, independently
of active social recognition, does not give rise to the status of right holder. Without the
mutual acknowledgement by a community of others of one’s equal standing as a human
person, one is effectively without rights insofar as human rights constitute a social prac-
tice formed through reciprocal recognition within the political realm. As practices of
social recognition, rights confer an effective political status that thereby acknowledges
the justice (or injustice) of certain ways of acting and being treated. The recognition
approach thereby (re)politicizes both rights and human status, since these can be won or
lost within the continuous dynamics of recognition and misrecognition in the political
realm. The danger of an inherent-​rights approach is that it overlooks complex ways that
inequalities in status have been and continue to be depoliticized. As recognition theory
emphasizes, possessing rights is not “a matter of being constituted in a certain way” but
“of being afforded a certain sort of social recognition” (Darby 2009: 132).
As with both the basic rights account and the social determinants view of health, then,
the recognition approach is deeply concerned with social relationships that involve the
imposition of unjustified status inequalities (economic, juridical, political, cultural) giv-
ing rise to disempowering experiences of disrespect, stigmatization, or exclusion of cer-
tain individuals or groups from claiming rights (Honneth 2007). All three approaches
bring to our attention the often-​overlooked interplay between forms of economic
deprivation and sociocultural misrecognition. Moreover, recognition theory discloses
how political exclusion and socioeconomic deprivation are mutually reinforcing bases
for the denial of equal human status and thus the deprivation of human rights. To be
impoverished, malnourished, a racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual minority, disabled or
suffering disease and chronic illness are conditions commonly treated as pathological
“defects” (as on the biomedical model) or “threats” (as on the securitization model)
exhibited by the less-​than-​human. Poor health has a potential for social stigmatization
when regarded as a deviation from “normalcy.” This is why the link between health sta-
tus and social, economic, and political status is crucial to the human right to health. For
the right to be effectively enjoyed, it is insufficient to be formally granted a legal entitle-
ment, since numerous social factors—​including poverty, discrimination, pollution,
and illiteracy—​negatively impact the ability of some individuals or groups to gain due
recognition as legitimate and equal rights-​bearers. Often those who disproportionately
bear the burden of ill-​health are also those subject to misrecognition—​not heard, seen,
or wanted as equal persons in the sociopolitical realm. Poor health can then become a
marker that attaches inferior status to misrecognized individuals and groups.
It is no coincidence that “post-​Westphalian” social movements of the poor and
socially excluded increasingly frame their struggles for “participatory parity” and “equal
366   Patrick Hayden

voice” (Fraser 2008) in terms of human rights that are conditioned by deeply contextual
asymmetries of misrecognition. The dynamics of misrecognition are, for instance, his-
torically associated with the struggles against religious intolerance and against slavery,
for worker’s rights and for women’s suffrage, and, more recently, for indigenous peoples’
rights as well as for health care justice. Because health inequalities and lack of access
to adequate health care services, treatment, and essential medicines are problems that
affect individuals and groups in the global South as well as the North, promotion of the
right to health is part of a growing global struggle against geopolitical structural asym-
metries bracketing the right to health outside the dominant statist frame of surveillance
and control. The ongoing global movement for healthcare justice consists of numerous
groups, NGOs, coalitions, and collaborative networks engaged in direct action, both
intra-​and transnationally, to promote provision of the goods, services, and conditions
necessary for the realization of the highest attainable standard of health on afford-
able, equitable terms to all persons. Notable examples include the Treatment Action
Campaign (TAC) in South Africa, the Movimento Sanitário in Brazil, the National
Movement for the Defense of the Right to Health in Paraguay, the Right to Health and
Health Care Campaign in India, and the global People’s Health Movement (see Turiano
and Smith 2008). The healthcare justice movement is not homogeneous, since many
health-​related needs and deprivations are dependent on context and constituency, but
the overall aim is to prioritize the needs of the global poor. In South Africa, for example,
TAC adopted a successful strategy of pursuing claims for access to adequate medical
treatment and essential medicines, including public antiretroviral provision for poor
people living with HIV/​AIDS, through a combination of rights-​based public interest
litigation and political mobilization “led by people with HIV” so as to construct a non-​
stigmatized status and thereby resist their sociocultural subordination and disrespect
(Heywood 2009: 17). Along these lines, Pogge (2010: 21) notes that the patent protec-
tionism enforced by the WTO’s multilateral Agreement on Trade-​Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) inflates the prices of essential medicines, dis-
courages R&D for “unprofitable” diseases that mainly affect developing countries, and
further entrenches global health inequalities by curtailing the access of poor people to
more affordable generic versions of brand-​name pharmaceuticals. The point to stress
is that activism for health equity involves empowering disadvantaged individuals and
groups to have a voice in raising public awareness about social disparities in health, to be
advocates for their own priority health needs, and to act as participants in the political
struggle for recognition of their status as equal rights-​holders.

Conclusion

The human right to health entails ethical claims about vital human interests, legal meas-
ures establishing a set of interrelated entitlements, and political actions intended to pre-
vent harm and improve lives. The normative ideal of the highest attainable standard of
health ensured for all may be ambitious, but it is based on the urgent vision that access to
 Health and the Challenge of Poverty    367

adequate health services and essential medicines is a requisite not merely for life but for
a properly human life of meaningful dignity, wellbeing, and functioning. This chapter
has examined the centrality of health to human wellbeing and the institutional inser-
tion of the question of health within the international human rights framework. Here
the right to health is, to use Shue’s expression, a “basic right.” Basic rights bring with
them demands for the mitigation and progressive rectification of global health inequal-
ities and unequal distributions of the social determinants of health, which dispropor-
tionately affect those living in poverty. But beyond matters of material deprivation and
problems of economic redistribution, my aim has been to show that a deeper engage-
ment with the right to health reveals how poverty and inequality are bound up with dis-
criminatory attitudes, lack of respect, and non-​inclusive subordination. Misrecognition
contributes to systemic disavowal of the social determinants of health and thus to the
fates of those living (or dying) under the grossly unequal burden of ill health. Health
inequalities arise from the ways that inequalities in power, resources, and status, both
within and between countries, condition the ability of different individuals and groups
to access adequate health care and essential medicines, and to live at least reasonably
healthy and therefore properly human lives.
I have argued that, seen in this light, the human right to health is best conceived not
as an inherent pre-​political right but as a political claim emerging from struggles for
equal recognition in contexts of inequality and deprivation on the part of those most
vulnerable to health disparities. This argument has sought to illustrate several dis-
tinctive contributions that a critical recognition perspective makes to fostering the
conditions necessary for the highest attainable standard of health and wellbeing for
everyone: empowering the poor to hold governments accountable for health inequal-
ities; creating opportunities for public inclusion in developing policies and programmes
that are consistent with human wellbeing; providing a framework for redress of rights
violations and social exclusion; and mobilizing civil society action to achieve acknow-
ledgement of the right to health. Yet undeniable tensions remain in the international
domain between contending statist and globalist definitions, priorities, and processes
of health security and human rights. Likewise, addressing preventable and unwarranted
disparities in health status that reinforce the poor’s lack of power and voice is, for inter-
national political theorists, a principal challenge going forward. This situation reveals
that the meaning and practical reality of the human right to health is still in flux. In
short, the intersection of poverty and health continues to be a multifaceted, complex,
and far-​reaching human rights issue of the first importance.

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 ­c hapter 28

In ternationa l P ol i t i c a l
T heory and L G BTQ Ri g h ts

Anthony J. Langlois

In theorizing “gay rights as human rights,” International Political Theory (IPT) neces-
sarily engages a fraught terrain: the real-world politics of rights for lesbians, gays, bisex-
uals, trans, and queer people is deeply contested. While now recognized by the UN and
leading democratic states (if still incompletely and often haphazardly), LGBTQ1 rights
are denied in many other quarters. Empirical research in global sexuality politics dem-
onstrates the value of human rights in securing protections for LGBTQ people; at the
same time, it highlights the ambiguities associated with the universalizing claims of this
rights politics.
In this chapter, I discuss how the use of LGBTQ rights claims highlights the need for
critical theoretical approaches to human rights. These approaches consider the practice
of human rights—​specifically here of LGBTQ rights—​in the context of real-​world pol-
itics. Theorists are required to go beyond normative and abstract claims, such as the
one made famous by Hillary Clinton at the UN, that “gay rights are human rights”; they
are also required to consider the politicized and sometimes antithetical use to which
such claims are put in the foreign policies of states and the behaviour of other inter-
national actors. The practice of gay rights by states and other agents, like the practice of
other human rights, can be caught up in a politics which undermines the emancipatory
impetus of the initial social movement.

The United Nations and LGBT Rights

as Human Rights

The United Nations is the centre of the global human rights regime (see Chapter 23), yet
until recently it neglected the physical abuse and political disenfranchisement suffered
 IPT and LGBTQ Rights    371

by people of diverse sexuality and gender identities, the non-​heteronormative, the

queer. In the last decade, however, this situation has changed remarkably. Former UN
Secretary-​General Ban Ki-​moon powerfully urged all states to address the human rights
abuse of LGBT persons. He declared the struggle for the protection of LGBT rights
“one of the great, neglected challenges of our time” (UN 2013). The UN also launched
a major global education campaign on LGBT rights, called “Free and Equal” (cf. UN
2012). Similarly, in a controversial landmark speech at the UN, Hillary Clinton, as US
Secretary of State, enjoined the world to recognize that “gay rights are human rights, and
human rights are gay rights” (Clinton 2011). Most recently, on 30 June 2016, after exten-
sive debate (ARC International and ILGA 2016), the Human Rights Council voted in
favour of a UN Special Procedure, establishing the office of an Independent Expert on
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) (UNHRC 2016).
Notwithstanding these developments, there is no international human rights instru-
ment or treaty which explicitly guarantees that individuals or groups should not be dis-
criminated against or otherwise have their human rights violated as a consequence of
sexuality diversity or gender identity. As Francine D’Amico points out in her discussion
of the full range of UN human rights instruments, “none of these documents specifically
identifies sexual and gender minorities as entitled to these protections, and several con-
tain language that may be used to justify discrimination and violence against sexual and
gender minorities”—​with “morality and public order” clauses being clear instances (for
an example see UDHR, Article 29.2) (D’Amico 2015: 55).
In the absence of dedicated instruments, legal and political advocacy depends on
the application of existing human rights protections and the expansion of their remit
through various strategies. This process can be observed in the development, by inde-
pendent advocacy organizations, of the Montreal Declaration and the Yogyakarta
Principles, both in 2006. These, and particularly the latter, sought to interpret existing
international human rights law in ways which would emphasize and make explicit the
protection of LGBTQ persons that such law implies.
Despite the rigid polarization of views between states on gender and sexuality
(Symons and Altman 2015), various UN fora have voted in favour of LGBT human
rights measures. The Human Rights Council has twice voted to request reports from
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on discrimination and violence against
individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, the first issued in
2011 and a second in 2015. Notwithstanding some positive developments in some
jurisdictions in the period between the two reports, “continuing, pervasive, violent
abuse, harassment and discrimination” are reported to be experienced in all regions
(UNHRC 2015).
The UN Security Council has also convened its first meeting on LGBT rights. The
meeting comes in the context of the assault by Islamic State (IS) against territories in
Iraq and Syria. A particularly horrific part of IS strategy involves rounding up men
thought to be gay and executing them by hurling them from rooftops. While not all UN
Security Council members attended, those present met with IS victims of anti-​gay vio-
lence as well as experts from the NGO community (Reinl 2015; see also Long 2015).
372   Anthony J. Langlois

It remains a fact that the “principled differences” between states in the halls of the
UN on matters of sexuality diversity and gender identity and expression are all too
often polite ways of justifying and perpetuating forms of violence which are on a con-
tinuum with those used by IS (Altman and Symons 2016). While Russia, for example,
attended the informal UNSC LGBT rights meeting, Vladimir Putin is at the forefront of
an international “traditional values” coalition which promotes anti-​gay laws and decries
LGBTQ rights (Wilkinson 2014).

Global Sexuality Politics in

the Real World

To this point in our discussion we have a reasonably straightforward account of the

“standard narrative”: the development of the global human rights regime through the
UN and its extension—​halting and haphazard—​to LGBTQ populations. Human rights
are an unambiguously good thing, their failure to cover LGBTQ populations an unam-
biguously bad thing, and in the struggle to extend the regime, there are clear indicators
of who is on “the right side of history” (Clinton 2011). A principal purpose of this chapter
is to complicate this account; to suggest that the extension of human rights to LGBTQ
populations has other consequences, which in turn set up a complicating agenda for the
theorization of the practice of human rights as gay rights.
We must ask: what happens when forms of sexual and gender politics around the
world are brought under the remit of the global human rights regime? When they are
conceptualized as something to be addressed, managed, and evaluated using tools called
“LGBTQ rights” (Drucker 2000; Lind 2010)? Clearly, a major impetus for this engage-
ment is the violence and discrimination suffered by individuals and groups of people.
But the absence of a human rights sexuality and gender politics should not be under-
stood to mean the absence of sexuality and gender politics—​politics which are always
admixed with class and race, and which cover the whole gamut of human experience,
from cruel repression through to celebration of difference (see e.g. Boellstorff 2007).
Both the human rights project and the internationalization of the figure that we might
think of as the “global gay” (Altman 1997; Martel 2013) bring with them particular and
specific understandings of sexuality and gender (Thoreson 2011). This can very often
lead to rights activists engaging in the same kinds of reductive practices around sexu-
ality and gender as their erstwhile opponents, their emancipatory intent being under-
mined by neo-​orientalist social and geographic imaginaries (Rao 2014). These issues
point to the need for a gay rights activism which is imbued with a strong critical the-
oretical awareness. We cannot not want LGBTQ rights (cf. Spivak 2009), but as a close
examination of the real-​world experience of LGBTQ rights advocacy and the use of gay
rights by states in their foreign policies will show, not all approaches to gay rights are
equally emancipatory.
 IPT and LGBTQ Rights    373

Developing a Critical Theoretical

Approach

Human rights articulates a normative vision of a world in which all persons have equal
moral worth and are treated as such. But is this what is delivered by real-​world human
rights politics, activism and institutionalization (Stammers 2009)? How should we
understand human rights if the practice of human rights does not deliver results in line
with their normative self-​articulation? This should be of significant concern for the
increasingly visible and institutionalized world of LGBTQ advocacy, as it gears up to
establish itself as a fully credentialled member of the global human rights community
(Thoreson 2014; Seckinelgin and Paternotte 2015).
Within international political theory, these developments have led to a reappraisal of
what we understand human rights to be and, critically, of how we should theorize them
(Douzinas and Gearty 2014). It is clear that traditional ways of understanding human
rights—​ways which operated as self-​contained or systematic philosophical discourses
about the nature and foundations of rights, for example—​have become inadequate for
understanding the role human rights have come to play in our world (Hoover 2016).
While often interesting and sophisticated, such systems typically have little relationship
to the unfolding of human rights in the real world which we inhabit. International pol-
itical theory has thus turned to theorizing the practice of human rights in the real world.
This reappraisal is important for LGBTQ rights—​both for the possibility and the ways of
understanding LGBTQ rights to be human rights, but also with respect to understand-
ing the limits of human rights for the political objectives pursued by coalitions of sexu-
ality-​and gender-​diverse people.
Charles Beitz observed that “human rights practice is not a mature social practice.”
He continued,

There is disagreement about all its main elements—​for example, about the content of
its norms, the eligible means for their application and enforcement, the distribution
of responsibilities to support them, and the weight to be accorded to considerations
about human rights when they come into conflict with other values. International
human rights institutions lack capabilities for authoritative adjudication of disputes
and coercive enforcement of the practice’s norms. The division of labor between pub-
lic human rights institutions and nongovernmental organisations that participate
in international institutional processes is unstable. Most importantly [ . . . ] there is
no unambiguous basis for establishing the boundaries of the discursive community
within which the practice takes place. (Beitz 2009: 10)

As if to bear witness to these observations, Beitz’s own analysis hews very closely to the
status quo, with concomitantly disappointing results for anyone wishing to push the
envelope of human rights activism—​including those supporting women’s rights and
democracy as a human right, which Beitz discusses, and (extrapolating from these)
374   Anthony J. Langlois

LGBTQ rights as human rights. The contentious nature of these rights, in Beitz’s analysis,
limits our capacity to affirm them as central elements of the practice of human rights.
Not all practice theorists end up in the cul-​de-​sac of the status quo. An alternative
analysis is provided by Christina Lafont. She argues that contingent features of the
practice of human rights are often given the status of constitutive norms, thereby “giv-
ing undue authority to the status quo”—​the role of the state in conceptualizing human
rights is the particular target of her analysis. She suggests that “this argumentative move
(privileging the status quo) serves the ideological purpose of closing off—​by conceptual
fiat—​substantive normative questions that ought to be open to serious debate within
the practice” (Lafont 2014: 60–​1). She goes on to develop a practice account which is
“dynamic” and “pluralist” in its understanding of human rights norms (cf. Lafont 2012).
A practice approach requires that we theorize human rights on the basis of our appre-
hension of how they operate within the real world. Following this, I ask what we might
learn when we examine the way in which claims about LGBTQ rights as human rights
are already being used in the real world. My intention here is to examine, necessarily in
brief, some of the intersections between global sexuality and gender politics and the dis-
course of human rights, and to consider what happens when these meet. I suggest that
this examination of the real world of gay rights offers us some chastening conclusions.

Gay Rights as Human Rights in

the Global Order

As we have seen, gay rights as human rights have been put firmly on the agenda by
the UN. It is a development supported by key powerful states, as we saw with Hillary
Clinton’s groundbreaking speech to the UN. This celebrated speech is not without its
ambiguities, however: examining them is vital for understanding how we might the-
orize LGBTQ rights as human rights in the real world. Clinton’s speech does not just
articulate LGBTQ persons as human rights subjects. The speech also flags a certain use
of LGBTQ sexuality politics, by and for specific agents, in the context of global politics.
This complicates our understandings of claims about rights and justice (see Chapter 8).
The key soundbite of Clinton’s speech—​that gay rights are human rights—​takes on a dif-
ferent cast when it is moved from the context of universalist normative claims and put
into the context of the geopolitics of aid, humanitarian assistance, sanctions, and inter-
ventions. This is a context in which both sexuality politics and human rights work in dif-
ferent ways for different audiences, regions, and agents. These differences are crucial to
our understandings of what human rights are and can do in the world (for an extended
reading of Clinton’s speech, see Weber 2016: ch. 5).
As Anna M. Agathangelou argues:

Drawing on human rights to open space for the rights of queers and for expressions
of queerness is crucial, but the intended universality of the human rights framework
 IPT and LGBTQ Rights    375

is haunted by an incapacity to agree internationally on basic terms (i.e. who deserves

human rights and under what conditions). In fact, the discourse with which states
support/​do not support the rights of queers legitimates imperial preemptive strikes
in the very composition of intimacies, global order and understandings of life, ter-
ror and death. Clinton proposes gay rights as human rights and links them with
humanitarian aid. Yet, this move bolsters neoconservative projects and violences: it
“often increases the vulnerability of those in the Global South” (wa Mutua 1996, 590),
people of colour and those in the margins of the North. (Agathangelou 2013: 459)

Agathangelou sets out three moves which link sexuality and race in ways which mark
out states from the non-​West as failed states, with concomitant implications for how
they are treated within constructions of global order. First, “there is a refusal to admit
that sexual violence is not limited to parts of the non-​Western world or to queers, dis-
placing the fact that sexual violence is a global politico-​economic problem.” Second, the
role of capitalism/​neoliberalism in configuring who gets rights, and in undermining the
universalist claims associated with rights enjoyment, is routinely dismissed. Third, the
freedoms of queers becomes a fetishized human rights response, which displaces con-
cerns with the deeper and broader structures and relations which generate the issues
faced by those queers and by others. Agathangelou argues that these moves combine in
the north/​south discourse of global sexuality politics to create “not only the ‘straitjack-
eting’ of sexuality, but also racial terror—​where ‘gay rights’ becomes a discourse and a
practice of (perceived) racial economic superiority and (actual) racial subordination”
(Agathangelou 2013: 455).
It has long been recognized that human rights are commonly instrumentalized in the
geopolitical games of powerful global actors. This, Agathangelou insistently flags for us,
will be no less the case for gay rights as human rights, as is shown immediately by their
cooption into discourses of aid and interventionist humanitarianism: “queer sexuality
finds itself transcending towards the higher realm of a universal subject by colluding in
the erection and reconstruction of terror structures” (Agathangelou 2013: 471–​2).

Homonormativity
The collusion between queer sexuality and “terror structures” is an apt pivot on which
to turn to a range of recent work which seeks to critically interrogate the way in which
norms around queer sexuality find uses in international politics. The focus in much of
this work is on the way in which norms often associated with human rights, emancipa-
tion, or liberation have, in their practice in relation to sexuality and gender, come into
the service of various forms of politics which in fact undermine the ostensible goals of
universal human rights—​that is, rights understood to serve an emancipatory or liber-
ation agenda.
Much of this work gains its conceptual inspiration from a coinage introduced
by Lisa Duggan in 1992, when she articulated a critique of what she then called “the
new homonormativity.” This critique was developed in the face of changes within the
376   Anthony J. Langlois

American—​and broadly speaking diverse Western—​public cultures of homosexuality.

A key feature was the change from an identification of gay politics with liberationist
radicalism to an identification with (as it were) LGBTQ versions of the heteronormative
sexuality politics of neoliberalism. Of this new “homonormativity,” Duggan says, “it is a
politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions
but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay con-
stituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and con-
sumption” (Duggan 2002: 179). She argues:

This New Homonormativity comes equipped with a rhetorical recoding of key terms
in the history of gay politics: “equality” becomes narrow, formal access to a few con-
servatizing institutions, “freedom” becomes impunity for bigotry and vast inequal-
ities in commercial life and civil society, the “right to privacy” becomes domestic
confinement, and democratic politics itself becomes something to be escaped. All
of this adds up to a corporate culture managed by a minimal state, achieved by the
neoliberal privatization of affective as well as economic and public life. (Duggan
2002: 190)

Whereas “gay liberation” had historically been understood as a project of the left which
sought to emancipate sexuality and challenge societal norms, under the new homonor-
mativity, LGBTQ populations are assimilated into the prevailing normative framework
of society. Former British prime minister David Cameron is an apt example here, with
his declaration that he supports same-​sex marriage not despite but because of his con-
servatism (Cameron 2011)!
Instead of LGBTQ sexual relations being criminalized, they are to be regulated by
prevailing heterosexual institutions—​monogamy, marriage, even procreation and the
nuclear family. The package includes submission to all the prevailing forms of economic
and social convention, replete as they are with economic injustice and conservative
mores. The extension of “gay rights” to LGBTQ populations appears to have consoli-
dated established social-​structural injustices, rather than being a key vector in their
overthrow.
It is precisely this dynamic which has been taken up in the extension of Duggan’s
coinage, beyond the analysis of American and other Western domestic political strug-
gles around gay rights, to the roles they have come to play on the international stage.
“Homonationalism,” “homocolonialism,” and “homocapitalism” become international
analogues for the new homonormativity, and provide a basis for critically evaluating the
sometime exercise of gay rights at the global level.

Homonationalism
Promoting and protecting LGBTQ rights can be good propaganda. The provision of
rights, by a state, for people of diverse sexuality and gender identity expression may be
used for purposes which are anathema to the broader human rights project to which
 IPT and LGBTQ Rights    377

LGBTQ rights are standardly thought to belong. Here we have the cooptation of LGBTQ
identities and rights protection discourses into broader political projects which include
the erosion or denial of rights to others, projects which trade on the “good” of LGBTQ
rights protection to hide the less politically congenial consequences of other policies for
other groups. LGBTQ rights thus become positioned against the broader project of pol-
itical justice; used, in fact, to obscure the conduct of injustice. Generally, this phenom-
ena is known as “pinkwashing”; when closely analysed in the context of state behaviour,
and taking its cue from Duggan’s analysis, “homonationalism” (Puar 2006; 2007; 2013).
Central to the discussion is an examination of the way in which states position them-
selves with respect to “their” LGBTQ populations; pink-​washing here is engaged when
states use their positive treatment of these populations as a foreign-​policy tool in other
contexts (Franke 2012: 3).
Franke, for example, undertakes a close examination of this state behaviour with
respect to the policies of Israel, Romania, Poland, Iran, the USA, and the European
Union. In each, she traces the way in which “good behaviour” on gay rights is used to
distract from state policies which undermine human rights and political justice in other
areas. Franke asks us to consider “who and what is actualized when the LGBT subject is
given a voice through the intervention of human rights.” It is clear that when this inter-
vention comes from states, “a ‘gay right’ is not a ‘gay right’ is not a ‘gay right’ ” (Franke
2012: 39) The gay whose politics and subject position, ethnicity, and religion suits the
agenda of the state may find themselves to be the “good citizen” who receives recogni-
tion, identity, and status. But at whose cost?
Maya Mikdashi provides a clear example of how the practice of such homonationalist,
pink-​washed LGBTQ rights undermines the broader project of political justice:

Today, the promise of “gay rights” for Palestinians goes something like this: The
United States will protect your right to not be detained [ . . . ] as a gay, but will not pro-
tect you from being detained because you are Palestinian. As a queer, you have the
right to love and have sex with whomever you choose safely and without discrimin-
ation, but you do not have the right to be un-​occupied, or to be free from oppression
based on your political beliefs, actions, and affiliations. As long as it is Arabo-​Islamic
culture and its manifestation through (Palestinian) law that is oppressing you, we are
here for you. If you are being oppressed by Israeli colonial policies, you’re on your
own. As long as you confine your politics to your sexuality, and you speak as a queer
subaltern in a language of rights that we understand (because we wrote it) we are
here for you. One is tempted to call the production of such a narrow and reductive
framework through which queers are to become politically legible an exercise in
homophobia. (Mikdashi 2011)

Homocolonialism
Human rights in general are a product of modernity, and LGBTQ rights are often viewed
as being at the cutting edge of human rights; traditional cultural and religious practices
378   Anthony J. Langlois

are associated with the discrimination and abuse that LGBTQ people often receive. Gay
rights are associated with a discourse of progress, secularism, and modernity. A critical
approach to global LGBTQ rights practice complicates this picture.
On the one hand, LGBTQ rights are still an achievement in progress in the “modern
West” of this picture, and discrimination and abuse in the West are commonplace. Even
in the West, then, the realization of LGBTQ rights is intermittent and far from univer-
sal. Further, the “traditional” religions and cultures swept together in this formulation
include an extremely diverse range of expressions of gender and sexuality. On the other
hand, such an uncritical account of rights and progress enables the practice of gay rights
to become a vector within broader political formations that—​by rehearsing colonial
approaches and dispositions—​undermines the emancipatory normativity of the human
rights regime. A simplistic association of gay rights with progress, and of their rejection
with traditionalism, authorizes a form of “homocolonialism”: populations which resist
gay rights are marked out as inferior, and a sense of Western exceptionalism is reinforced
(Rahman 2014b: 275). As Momin Rahman comments, “Queer rights are certainly being
used within the international realm as criteria for ‘progress,’ both by governments and
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) based on a Western understanding of both
sexual identity and modernization and, moreover, to paint resistant multicultural popu-
lations as incompatible with dominant social values” (2014b: 279)
Rahman’s analysis illustrates these dynamics by considering the relationship between
LGBTQ rights and Muslim populations, and the deployment of sexual politics in dis-
courses of progress, modernity, and Western exceptionalism (Rahman 2014a). A cen-
tral insight he develops is the way in which homophobia and Islamophobia are linked
through these sociopolitical formations; the way in which Muslim homophobia can be
provoked by the homocolonialist use of LGBTQ rights. He also argues, “Muslim resist-
ance to sexual diversity politics is just as much a part of the triangulation of Western
exceptionalism as is Western homocolonialism because it accepts the formation of
homosexualities as exclusively Western, possible only in the accelerated forms of mod-
ernity that are ‘owned’ by the West” (Rahman 2014b: 282).
On this account, common practices both of support for and of resistance to LGBTQ
rights are embedded in much broader global political formations; effective support for
sexual freedom globally must be cognisant of and engaged with these formations.

Homocapitalism
Another sphere in which we see a similar pattern concerns the practices of global cap-
italism and international development. Rahul Rao notes an “increased vociferousness”
among the representatives of global capital against homophobia. Rather than join-
ing the “business case for LGBTQ rights” cheer squad, however, Rao is concerned to
examine the way in which international financial institutions adopt a view of homo-
phobic practices which mark them out as “merely cultural” behaviour. This, Rao argues,
“enables international financial institutions (IFIs) to obscure the material conditions
 IPT and LGBTQ Rights    379

that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-​producing
those conditions” (Rao 2015: 38).
Rao sets his analysis within the debates over recognition and redistribution, and
focuses his attention on the role of the World Bank in Uganda. Uganda has garnered
a great deal of attention in recent years for its anti-​homosexual legislative agenda, and
for associated human rights abuses. On the passing of Uganda’s Anti-​Homosexuality
Act, a US$90 million loan from the World Bank to Uganda was suspended. This, says
Rao, “constitutes perhaps the single most coercive response by an IFI to a member state
action perceived to be homophobic” (Rao 2015: 45). It was clearly intended to telegraph
support for LGBTQ rights, and is of a piece with other LGBTQ supportive develop-
ments at the World Bank and in the sector more broadly. The World Bank thus appears
to be doing its bit to prevent human abuse of LGBTQ people (see also Gosine 2010; more
generally, Bedford 2009).
Rao argues, however, that this appearance is misleading, and that it hides the Bank’s
responsibility for the harsh economic circumstances in which the politics of hate finds
root (see Chapter 34). Rao suggests we need to look closely at the production and con-
sumption sides of the conditions which produce fertile ground for rights-​abusive moral
panics. In Uganda, the World Bank played a critical role in producing the economic and
political structures that facilitated enormous influence for those who set out to promote
homophobic discourse. In particular, the role of the Bank’s neoliberal structural adjust-
ment prescriptions in shrinking the state and handing over education, health, and wel-
fare to private, religious, and—​in the case of Uganda—​virulently homophobic providers
(international and local) cannot be understated (Rao 2015: 46). On the “consumption
side,” addressing why it is that people respond to and take up homophobic discourse, the
Bank is also implicated. Economic and social insecurity on a vast scale due to neoliberal
restructuring, and the concomitant “modernization” of social relations and structures,
is well understood to provide the material conditions which generate moral panics.
These then threaten the rights and wellbeing of potential scapegoat populations, includ-
ing LGBTQ people.
Powerful financial institutions and the agents of global capital may, like powerful
states, profess a commitment to LGBTQ rights; but the actual practice of human rights
is rooted in policy settings and economic behaviours which sustain the material condi-
tions that make rights possible. The behaviour of these economic agents, their policies
and prescriptions, cause these conditions to be undermined, leading directly to situ-
ations of rights abuse. This causal relationship must be accounted for in any “real-​world”
theorizing about human rights.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have observed the way in which LGBTQ rights have become a part
of the practice of human rights. While the normative orientation of human rights is
380   Anthony J. Langlois

emancipatory, its practice in the real world by political agents can be used for the stand-
ard range of political purposes: good, bad, and indifferent. This reality must be central
to any international political theory for or of “gay rights as human rights”—​as indeed it
should be for any theorization of the practice of human rights.
Sexuality and gender politics have particular vectors and valences, and these funda-
mentally shape the way in which human rights work, or do not work, for populations
of LGBTQ people. Similarly, they shape the ways in which advocates, opponents, and
opportunists will use the practice of human rights as gay rights for different political pur-
poses. LGBTQ rights can be instrumentalized, they can be used as tools in power plays;
we have observed them being used for geopolitical and neoliberal ends. Much the same
can be seen in any domain of human rights practice, and this must be part of our the-
orization of their practice. At the same time, because human rights discourse is consti-
tutively about human dignity, equality, freedom, justice, and wellbeing, it is powerfully
capable of immanent critique, and retains an extraordinary global appeal to people fight-
ing for justice. This too must be central to our theorization, and is the bedrock of the gen-
eral practice of human rights. It is this which provides any guarantee against scepticism,
relativism, cynicism, and the prospect of rights as nothing more than a play for power.
The focus of this chapter has been on complicating the discussion of LGBTQ rights. By
showing forms of analysis that critical theoretical approaches to human rights can take,
and exploring with them some of the ways in which policy around LGBTQ rights has been
put to work in the real world, we see that the practice of these rights is often in tension
with their emancipatory discourse. This dynamic, here explored to critically interrogate
LGBTQ rights, is also the basis for addressing the question of what might be done, of how
to respond. Human rights transparently stakes a claim for human dignity, equality, and
wellbeing. A failure to deliver is unmistakable, and on its own terms demands account-
ability. Human beings return again and again, with hope, to ideals of justice, while recog-
nizing the limitations of attempts to realize them. In our age, as we observed above, we
cannot not want human rights. LGBTQ people rightly demand inclusion in the human
rights political project, notwithstanding its weaknesses. The only remedy for these weak-
nesses is the fierce determination shown by many LGBTQ rights advocates and allies in
their day-​to-​day struggles to bend and mould human rights practice—​its politics, theory,
organizations, and institutions—​into the shape foreshadowed by its emancipatory goals.

Note
1. This acronym is variable in the literature. I will generally use LGBTQ, except when specific-
ally referencing other usages (e.g. the UN stays with the more conservative LGBT).

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 Pa rt V I

DE M O C R AC Y,
AC C OU N TA B I L I T Y,
A N D G L OBA L
G OV E R NA N C E
 ­c hapter 29

De mo cracy and G l oba l

Governa nc e

Carol C. Gould

Is it feasible to democratize the powerful institutions of global governance that currently

work to advance globalization processes? Can we make these institutions more respon-
sive to the needs and interests of the people affected by their policies? Or does the current
surge in nationalist politics mark a decisive turn away not only from globalization but
from the hope of international agreements to reign in its power in transnational ways?
I will begin by setting out the context for these questions and indicating some of the
key motivations for introducing new forms of democracy at the transnational level,
while also facing the possibility that globalization itself in its current incarnations may
be working against democracy at both national and transnational levels. The focus of
this chapter will nonetheless be on advancing arguments in favour of democratic trans-
formation transnationally, taking up the criteria for determining the scope of this dem-
ocratization, along with some indication of the institutions and spheres of political and
economic activity to which they would apply. It is clear that even modest transform-
ations face issues of feasibility (see Chapter 48) in the current political climate, which
appears to be increasingly hostile to international cooperation. Nonetheless, I believe
that normative political theory has the potential, and indeed the responsibility, to argue
for the need for real democratic transformation and to suggest useful directions for
increasing the democratic responsiveness of institutions, at both national and trans-
national levels. We have also seen the proliferation of protest movements calling for
greater democracy and accountability, at national and global levels. Their critiques often
focus on the ways in which globalization and its regulative institutions act in the inter-
est of the powerful and exclude the participation of the people deeply affected by their
functioning.
“Real-​world” developments such as these motivate the new theories analysed here
concerning how to deal with the democratic deficit in the institutions of global govern-
ance. After laying out this problem in greater detail, this chapter will consider some
theoretical approaches to addressing it. It is here that the field of International Political
386   Carol C. Gould

Theory (IPT) can make an especially significant contribution to social and political
practice. Reflecting on the various options for justifying democratic governance and
arguing for its expansion helps to clarify the framework for change that social actors
can choose to follow, whether these agents of change be social movements, civil society
organizations, or innovators in institutional design or public policy (see Chapter 36).
As we shall see, the various theoretical options that can be offered for justifying dem-
ocracy and accountability in global contexts have differing implications for practice.
An adequate theoretical framework can also help social actors prioritize among their
various goals and choose among the policies they could recommend. And the theories
themselves can be evaluated in terms of their import for practice (beyond the question
of their internal coherence).
This sort of reciprocal relation between social actors and critical reflection about dir-
ections they might pursue in the face of current social problems can be characterized as
a dialectical relation between theory and practice. The problems that theory addresses
emerge from the concrete reality of historical processes of increasing globalization
and democratic development within nation-​states, where the latter has thus far proven
inadequate to deal with the democratic deficit produced by globalization itself. Agents
attempting to remedy this deficit help to define the problems for theoreticians and also
take the lead in finding solutions. Yet, in the face of the question concerning what is to
be done in practice, IPT plays a crucial role in clarifying the relevant norms along with
the nature of the problems themselves; and it goes on to consider what light can be shed
on these problems and their possible solutions as viewed through various theoretical
lenses. This concrete context calls for critical theorizing about new and more responsive
directions for national and international politics—​a task that is taken up in various ways
in the chapters in this section.

The Democratic Deficit

in Globalization and Governance
Institutions

The problem of the democratic deficit arises in regard to current large-​scale global pro-
cesses and the institutions that attempt to guide and manage them, which can be criti-
cized as reflecting the interests of the powerful and affording little representation by
the many others whose interests are at stake. This criticism applies to the fundamen-
tals of economic globalization, which are largely under the control of transnational
corporations and not of their workers, who may be operating in substandard condi-
tions within communities affected by pollution and climate change. And it applies as
well to such institutions as the WTO and the IMF, within which wealthy and powerful
states of the global North exert disproportional influence, while the distantly situated
people affected by them have at best only marginal input into their policies and even less
 Democracy and Global Governance    387

into their decision-​making processes (see Chapter 34). Indeed, these institutions also
have effects on citizens of the powerful countries themselves, who tend to lack input into
their functioning.
The charge of a democratic deficit equally pertains to regional transnational institu-
tions and especially to the European Union, with its political institutions giving a major
role to largely unelected and often unresponsive bureaucrats. Finally, this problem char-
acterizes the United Nations itself, where the unrepresentative but decisive Security
Council is composed of powerful states, the five permanent members of which can exer-
cise a veto over decisions. The concentration of economic and political power in the
hands of states and other large actors has been matched by inequalities in real power and
wealth among individuals, both within states and across the globe. Are there ways to
give these individuals and the less powerful states themselves more say in determining
the policies that frame their activity?
Given the contemporary tendencies toward globalization and integration, this ques-
tion inevitably takes us beyond the issue of how to realize or deepen democracy within
nation-​states to the even more difficult question of how to introduce responsiveness and
meaningful accountability within the institutions of global governance. Urgent global
problems would seem to require global solutions, especially the major problem of cli-
mate change, and this demands a focus on how these institutions can act in collective
ways and in the common interest of providing adequate living situations for all people.
Moreover, a concern with fulfilling the requirements of human dignity and human
rights (including economic and social rights) for all requires developing more collective
approaches that treat people equally and meet their needs effectively (see Chapter 27).
A broad understanding of the problem of global governance and democracy also
requires us to look at the persistent lack of real democracy within national states,
prompted in part by the rise of economic globalization, and also to analyse the forces
that push back against it, sometimes in nationalist and undemocratic ways. Inasmuch
as the institutions of global governance themselves were set up through agreements
among states and are largely made up of state representatives, assessing their democratic
legitimacy requires us to ask whether these are actually representing the interests of all
their own members. Clearly, there are serious deficits in real democracy at the level of
nation-​states themselves. These problems should be kept in mind as we proceed, since
the democratic deficit within nation-​states and in transnational or global contexts are
clearly interconnected. Increasing the democratic accountability and representativeness
of global institutions would require a concomitant effort to address democratic deficits
at the national level.
Turning to the core issue of the grounds and possibilities for remedying democratic
deficits at the transnational or global level, several political theorists have put forward
frameworks of cosmopolitan or global democracy that seek to enable greater opportun-
ities for collective decision-​making concerning global problems (Held 1995; Archibugi
2008). These frameworks build on the historical contributions of philosophers like
Kant, but also draw on developments in international law that posit cross-​border norms
of human rights, and of jus cogens more generally, as norms that facilitate critique of
388   Carol C. Gould

existing state and transnational practices and that have led to a certain delimitation of
the sovereignty of states (Brunkhorst 2009). Some theorists have even argued for world
government as a necessary development of the notion of democracy itself (Marchetti
2012; Cabrera 2010). At the same time, some political theorists instead defend the notion
of sovereignty (Cohen 2012; Dahbour 2012), or have asserted a role for nationality
(Miller 1995) and national self-​determination (Walzer 1977) in the face of demands for
more global forms of distributive justice or cosmopolitan democracy. These theorists
generally argue that a global demos is impossible, and that even if it were possible, it
would be undesirable, losing the crucial value of cultural specificity and of traditions
that are of great importance to many people (Miller 2013; Walzer 1983).
Yet other theorists have sought to find a third way between the desiderata of cosmo-
politanism and attachment to political communities, by means of an emphasis on
universal human rights, along with enabling new opportunities for transnational demo-
cratic deliberation or participation in decision-​making (Gould 1988; 2004; 2009; 2014;
Benhabib 2004; see Chapter 33). At the same time, there has been a wide literature on the
way civil society organizations can play an increased role in the policy-​making of global
governance institutions, such as the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and the UN (e.g.
Scholte 2011). Despite some optimistic assessments, however, these global institutions
may be criticized for giving preponderant weight to the interests of powerful states and
corporations. Meanwhile, many NGOs in civil society themselves face the challenge of
a lack of democratic representativeness, confronting incentives to attend to the inter-
ests of donors or other financial backers rather than to the expressed needs of those
they serve.

Two Criteria for the Scope

of Transnational Democracy

Theorists have advanced two different lines of argument for increasing democracy in
transnational institutions, which correlate with distinct forms that such democratiza-
tion could take. These two approaches—​which we can call the “all subjected” and the “all
affected”—​fundamentally concern the proper scope of democracy, and suggest different
ways for enabling relevant participation when they are extended from national to trans-
national contexts. I will briefly lay out the divergent approaches and argue that neither
is fully adequate as it stands. I will then present the alternative that I have developed in
previous work, which integrates elements from both perspectives, and offer some fur-
ther arguments in its favour.
One traditional approach to justifying democracy and determining its scope appeals
to the notion that all those subject to laws should be able to participate in making them.
This approach has several variants. Often those theorizing along these lines put coer-
cion front and centre, and appeal to a principle of individual autonomy to argue that it
 Democracy and Global Governance    389

is specifically the limitation of freedom and autonomy imposed by the coerciveness of

law that requires democratic rights of participation in making these laws (or in choos-
ing representatives to make them). This general approach may highlight the issue of
justification—​that coercive laws have to be justified to all those subject to them (e.g.
Abizadeh 2008). Views of this general type tend to appeal to the norm of autonomy
understood as individual self-​determination, which must be respected and accommo-
dated by a political system for governing and its laws. A different variant of the “all sub-
jected” approach proposes that self-​determination should instead be understood in a
more collective fashion (rather than as individual autonomy). There, self-​determination
is taken as the right of the majority group within a territory to self-​rule in accordance
with the subjection principle cited above, and in this case the view can be called one of
democratic sovereignty.
We can ask, however, whether the perspectives that privilege coercion are correct
in seeing this as the defining feature that gives rise to the requirement of democracy.
Should we not instead understand the key feature of a political community to consist
not in its coercive character but in the way it is defined by shared goals and practices,
along with shared understandings among its members as to the existence of the com-
munity itself? Clearly, some element of coercive law is required by the norm of justice,
but this does not constitute the core of people’s lives together or, indeed (I would sug-
gest), the basis for the requirement for democracy. Moreover, the variant of the “all sub-
jected” approach that emphasizes collective self-​determination within a territory and
the concomitant requirement for self-​rule is problematic in limiting such contexts for
self-​determination to national states, i.e. to contemporary political communities that
occupy territory. Such an approach fails to see that the very considerations that require
democratic self-​determination within states apply as well to other self-​understood com-
munities (or to institutions more broadly)—​indeed, wherever we can plausibly speak of
equal membership.
I have instead proposed the notion of “common activities” to demarcate the spheres
within which democratic rights of participation are required, where these common
activities are organized around shared goals and plans, whether fully explicit or not.
I argue that democratic decision-​making is normatively required for members of such
communities or institutions (including economic ones) as an expression in these col-
lective contexts of people’s equality as agents. This equality requires that no one should
be in a position to dominate others in the decision-​making processes of these institu-
tions, or that no one has more of a right to determine the decisions about the collective
plans or policies than do others. This conclusion follows from what I have called the
norm of equal positive freedom (as a prima facie equal right to the political, economic,
and social conditions for self-​transformation), given that the opportunity to take part in
such common activities is a condition for people’s self-​development over time. Freedom
in this view has a biographical dimension that presupposes, but goes beyond, free
choice, and includes the development of capacities, the realization of long-​term goals,
and the cultivation of relationships. Insofar as individuals are social beings, or what
I have called “individuals-​in-​relations,” the opportunity to take part in joint or common
390   Carol C. Gould

activities is one of the key conditions for their free activity, and their fundamental equal-
ity as agents requires the co-​determination involved in democracy.
Evidently, this “common activities” approach is related to the “all subjected” one, but
it differs in a focus not only on rules and laws, but on extending our democratic concern
to all institutional contexts that involve shared goal setting and their realization. This
view attempts to emphasize more forward-​looking and dynamic dimensions of collect-
ive control in place of notions of coercion and subjection, in focusing on shared partici-
pation in ongoing planning processes.
Theorists who rely on notions of rule-​making by those subject to the rules, or on the
democratic sovereignty of a people within a territory, often come up against a major
difficulty when they consider how to extend democracy globally. This concerns the
requirement they face to locate a demos at this new, global level. Inasmuch as these the-
orists almost always imagine this extension of democratic community using the model
of a state, they have to posit a transnational, or even a global, community, understood in
territorial terms, with its associated people. Even if such a demos is understood as com-
posed of nested communities or quasi-​sovereign entities at lower levels, this view neces-
sarily pushes toward a global demos (Marchetti 2012). But theorists have been hard
pressed to identify any such unified global community in the present. Moreover, insist-
ing that effective decisions be taken at that global level would seem to require a move
to world government. Global democracy is most often operationalized in terms of the
traditional forms of democratic participation, namely voting and elections, but extrapo-
lated to the global level. An obvious difficulty is that people’s individual contributions at
that level would be minute. In addition, as many have noted, while a world government
would have an advantage in terms of possibly eliminating war among states, it also has
the potential, however small, of enabling global tyranny, with no sources of power to
counteract it (Arendt 1951; Gould 2004; 2009; 2014).
The conception I advance of common activities does in fact have some implications
for decision-​making at the level of global community, to the degree that one may emerge
centring around aims or needs and especially those concerned with mitigating or adapt-
ing to large-​scale climate change. But the notion of common activities applies as well
to any transnational (or national or subnational) community or institution defined by
shared goals, where we can reasonably talk about people being equal members of the
institution in question. The argument then is that because participation in common
activities and in the common life of a community is one of the conditions for individ-
ual self-​development, and because individual members are equal agents and none has a
right to dominate others, then in cases of joint or collective activities or institutions they
have equal rights to co-​determine the course of these activities together with the other
members, i.e. rights of democratic participation within such activities. This criterion for
the scope and applicability of democracy thus applies not only to states but also to the
various membership institutions in economic and social life, including firms and volun-
tary associations like NGOs, and it also applies to new cross-​border communities.
Indeed, in light of the growing number of transnational associations of various
sorts, the normative requirement for democratic decision-​making is extensive on my
 Democracy and Global Governance    391

view (however impractical it may presently seem). In previous work, I have suggested
that this democratic requirement can extend to regional associations of states (though
they are presently quite weak), and I have argued that this regional application is more
plausible in the short term than is a fully global world community (Gould 2012; 2014).
A proviso for all these new contexts for democratic decision-​making should be indi-
cated, however: they need to be framed by recognized human rights agreements and
protections, to provide cross-​border adjudication where relevant, and to avoid the well-​
known danger of a tyranny of the majority, along with other potential hazards involved
in democratic systems.
Yet the extension of democratic participation to a wider range of institutions and pol-
itical communities does not yet address a core problem of the contemporary world: the
way that decisions and policies by powerful states or institutions have important
exogenous effects, including on distantly situated people or groups. The impact of
policies is hardly restricted to those within the borders of the state or to the limits of
a given institution (although they are evidently deeply consequential for their mem-
bers); increasingly, these policies affect outsiders in significant ways. This observation
applies to transnational corporations, as well as to national states and the institutions of
global governance, whose decisions and policies can deeply affect the possibilities for
the fulfilment of human rights and the meeting of needs by distant people, in regard to
poverty, health, trade, etc. This in turn suggests the need for a different principle that
would justify democratic participation by the people affected, and in particular, what
has been called the “all affected” principle. I have elsewhere argued that this principle
is indeed a necessary supplement to the “common activities” criterion for participa-
tion, but that it also poses some difficulties of interpretation that have to be addressed
(Gould 2004; 2009; 2014). Because of the vast and in some ways indeterminate scope of
those affected, I have argued that this principle needs to be demarcated and delimited in
important ways.
To date, the “all affected” principle has been given two main interpretations. But I sug-
gest that each of these has problems in their present form, and that there is an alternative
reading that can avoid these problems.
On one interpretation, the “all affected” principle would require enfranchising all
those who are impacted by a decision, policy, or prospective law, in a way that would
inevitably lead to a global demos (Goodin 2007). We can recognize that most issues in
fact have wide (and sometimes unanticipated) consequences, and that some issues are
directly global in scope. Both factors require that we include a global level for decision-​
making, so as not to exclude any of those affected by the decisions in question. Issues
that are in fact global in scope include climate change and large-​scale economic glo-
balization, but even matters that appear local are bound to have wide-​ranging con-
sequences. Yet the constitution of a global demos that would decide on these matters
would be an extraordinarily demanding task, and would most likely not give sufficient
attention to local differences. In addition, individuals would have only a minuscule
input into decisions about problems at the global scale, since billions of people would
have to be enfranchised to participate or to be represented.
392   Carol C. Gould

An alternative interpretation of the “all affected” principle sees it as requiring the

constitution of a relevant demos for each issue set, or at the very least understands it as
entailing a multiplicity of transnational or subnational institutional contexts in which
people would participate, presumably to varying degrees, depending on their degree of
affectedness (Fung 2013). However, the first variant of this interpretation of the prin-
ciple would seem to require a constant reconstitution of the relevant communities of
deciders, depending on the particular people affected by a given proposal or policy or
law. This raises the crucial question of who would decide on which people are affected in
each case, with the substantial opening this would pose for deep disagreement. Indeed,
it also raises the theoretical possibility of an infinite regress of decisions about who
makes these decisions and how they would be made. This variant would thus seem to
revive and indeed intensify the already vexing problem of the constitution of a demo-
cratic demos, which, it would seem, cannot itself be constituted democratically.
The second variant would begin with existing organizations, and proposes includ-
ing those regularly and importantly affected in decision-​making. To deal with chan-
ging impacts, these organizations would need to give influence over their decisions to
all those affected, by way of a continual reassessment of who these people are and what
their interests are. While this approach gives attention to a wide range of organizations
beneath and above national states, it tacitly appeals to already constituted institutions,
which have in fact not been constituted by the inclusion of all people affected, and are
in my view better understood as organizations of members. I argue that these members
should in fact have equal rights of decision within these institutions, but that there is
also a need to hear from stakeholders who are non-​members and who are importantly
affected by the actions, policies, and decisions of these institutions or organizations (in a
sense to be further specified below).
A major problem with those affectedness approaches that fall short of a global demos
is that the core value of political equality is placed in jeopardy. Such equality (if only in
principle) remains a strength of existing citizenship models, and I have suggested that
it pertains broadly to all institutional contexts where it makes sense to talk of members
with broadly similar status as members, even if some currently have more power than
others within the institution. Moreover, those versions of the “all affected” principle
that see it as varying among individuals and contexts give insufficient attention to the
problem of retaining equality among individuals across the variety of different groups
in which they may have rights to participate. They would need to address how the cur-
rent disparities of power within institutions would be dealt with, where these disparities
would likely impact the decisions about who is affected and to what degree. Crucially,
too, existing approaches do not explore the key notion of what is an important interest,
without which the notion of including those affected in their interests remains some-
what vague and indeterminate.
In place of either of these understanding of affectedness—​as the global demos or as
a variety of transient groupings or evolving institutional contexts—​I have previously
proposed using the “all affected” criterion in addition to the “common activities” one,
where the latter itself applies to emerging transnational communities, as well as to truly
 Democracy and Global Governance    393

global ones, in accordance with a principle of subsidiarity (Gould 2004; 2009; 2014).
To avoid the vagueness involved in employing a general notion of “all affected” for each
decision—​in which those affected could extend indefinitely to untold others—​I have
suggested that we need a notion of those importantly affected, in a distinctive interpret-
ation. I argue that taking affectedness into account is important for democratic theory,
but that it serves less to justify basic rights of democratic participation among equals
than as a necessary supplement that addresses the exogenous effects of decisions and
policies on those who stand outside the given institution or community in question. In
cases where non-​members or outsiders (including distantly situated people) are import-
antly affected, they have a right to provide input into these decisions. In my view, this
does not necessarily constitute a new political community, where the criterion of com-
mon activities among equal members would take effect. Rather, it is designed to ensure
that policy-​makers and institutions be responsive to the needs and interests of those
who will be affected by their policies or decisions. This applies in a noteworthy way in
transnational contexts in which powerful states or global institutions have profound
effects on distant people. The “all affected” principle thus requires the introduction of
new forms of democratic input into the decisions and policies of these institutions, or
forms of transnational representation of the affected people’s views and concerns.
The question arises as to what should count as “importantly affected,” in these trans-
national or global contexts. My proposal is that the focus should be on the impacts of a
decision, or policy, or law on the possibilities of the fulfilment of human rights of those
affected by it (Gould 2004). By “human rights,” I am again referring not only to civil
and political rights but also to economic and social ones. Moreover, we need to distin-
guish between basic and non-​basic (though still essential) human rights, and prioritize
the fulfilment of the basic ones (Gould 2004). Among these are security, means of sub-
sistence, and the fundamental liberties. Where a policy directly impacts people’s pos-
sibilities of rights fulfilment, they should have a say in shaping the policy in question.
This may not always require equal rights of participation, as it would on the citizenship
model—​though sometimes robust opportunities for participation would be required, if
groups of people are equally or more affected than the policy-​makers. More commonly,
it would necessitate what we can call “democratic input” into the decisions rather than
equal participation, or else forms of representation of these affected people and their
interests. Thus it is not sufficient for policy-​makers to merely imagine the impacts on
distant people’s human rights or fundamental interests. Rather, they need to hear from
these affected people as to their needs and whether they are willing to accept the pro-
posed policies with the envisioned impacts.
This line of argument leads to a practical requirement for what I call “human rights
impact assessments” (Gould 2009), comparable to existing environmental impact
assessments. Such analyses would be required not only of states and the institutions of
global governance, but of all institutions that take decisions affecting people and com-
munities, e.g. economic corporations. However, such assessments are insufficient with-
out actually hearing from the affected people themselves, either directly or through
representatives. And to the degree possible, the people affected would need to have
394   Carol C. Gould

actual powers of participation or representation in the decision process, and in some

cases even a veto, in cases where the proposed course of action would seriously harm the
fulfilment of their human rights.
From this, we can also establish the need for reforms in global governance institutions
that would incorporate new modalities of democratic participation by those affected by
their policy-​making. Indeed, some of these institutions themselves may need to be dis-
banded and replaced by more democratic ones. In the next section, I will briefly review
some practical directions for democratizing these institutions to make them responsive
to the people they affect.

Directions for Democratic

Transformation

What, then, are the implications of the two criteria—​common activities and “all
affected”—​for our problem of the democratic deficit that pervades global governance
and globalization more generally? The general outlines have already been noted: the
criteria require the extension of democratic participation and representation to a wide
range of institutions and communities beneath and beyond national states, and the
development of new forms of transnational representation and democratic input into
the institutions of global governance and into the decisions of other large-​scale actors
on the part of people importantly affected by their decisions. I have pointed to impact
on human rights as an appropriate indicator of being affected, taking these to include
economic and social rights besides civil and political ones. This in turn requires that
these impacts be assessed and addressed by powerful actors, taking guidance from those
affected.
With respect to the requirement for the extension of democracy, this would include
new forms of participation by those who work in transnational corporate firms,
taking these corporations as quasi-​public institutions characterized by shared goals.
A like requirement pertains to the range of local communities, sub-​state regions, cross-​
border communities, and broader regional groupings of existing states. These various
communities are most often understood and imagined as such (as are nations)—​i.e.
people within these entities take themselves to be part of institutions or communities
characterized by common goals and interests. Nonetheless, their goals need not be fully
explicit but can be incorporated over time in their modes of functioning or in estab-
lished practices.
A significant implication of this view for our purposes concerns the development of
the regional institutions or agglomerations of states that have emerged in the contem-
porary period. The most salient case is the European Union, but regional associations,
both formal and informal, are widespread. Many of these originally emerged to address
the need for regional economic cooperation given globalization, e.g. the EU itself and
 Democracy and Global Governance    395

the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while other organizations have
more political beginnings, such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in its strug-
gle against apartheid in South Africa, and its successor, the African Union. Increasingly,
these associations of states address both economic and security concerns, and some-
times cultural and social ones. It is clear that, on the view presented here, democratic
participation would be required in these new regional bodies, but the forms they take
need not fully mirror those that have developed within national states. Even in the latter
contexts, I believe it is a mistake to limit our understanding of democracy simply to elec-
tions and majority rule, however important those may be. Regional associations have,
to date, attempted to balance the role within them of nation-​states with newer forms of
parliamentary and civil society participation, but as of yet, to very limited democratic
effect. Some are experimenting with direct participation by citizens from across the
region, but thus far these efforts primarily take the form of opportunities for dialogue,
with a few openings for citizen voter initiatives.
Beyond these large regional bodies lie a multiplicity of interstate organizations and
parliaments, made up of representatives of states—​generally, of their parliaments, as
well as a host of cross-​border associations of other types. Efforts have been made to
introduce forms of democratic participation within these, although in small-​scale ways.
These organizations range from autonomous ones like the Indigenous Parliament of
America or the Baltic Assembly to the Inter-​Parliamentary Union to regional assem-
blies like the European Parliament. Likewise, the range of civil society organizations
would be required by the common activities principle to organize themselves and to
operate in democratic ways. Crucially, the principle also applies to economic firms,
where the democratic requirement would be to introduce forms of self-​management.
Although there are many instances of successful self-​managing firms (e.g. Mondragon
Corporation Cooperativa), along with a vast number of worker and consumer co-​ops
worldwide, further democratization of decision-​making in this economic context con-
tinues to face serious obstacles and opposition. Nonetheless, in my view, these profound
practical challenges do not vitiate the strength of the normative desiderata themselves,
which can provide guidelines for moving ahead.
An important heuristic principle for organizing the various spheres of common
activity has emerged already from the European context. That is the principle of subsidi-
arity, which calls for decisions and policies to be made at the most local level possible.
This principle applies most easily to nested political communities organized by level—​
local, sub-​state regions, national states, transnational regions, and the global level itself.
Cross-​cutting or cross-​border transnational organizations, which themselves can be
seen as communities (whether they exist online or off), do not always sit easily with this
notion of subsidiarity, although they themselves may be nested within organizations of
larger scope. It must be admitted that in arguing for the extension of democratic man-
agement to all of these domains, conflicts may well arise in regard to their borders and
their legitimacy. In addition, the very multiplicity of domains could impact the polit-
ical equality of people who participate in just a few or in many of them. Nonetheless,
inasmuch as democratic ways of organizing these various institutions and communities
396   Carol C. Gould

primarily require transformations internal to each of these organizations, I believe that

this problem would not pose an insuperable barrier to the needed democratization.
However, all of these institutions and communities also have exogenous effects on
people affected by their decisions and policies, which go beyond their impacts on the
members themselves. For an adequate treatment of those far-​reaching effects, we will
need to consider the implications of our second principle, the “all affected” principle.
In order to develop these implications of the “all affected” principle for global gov-
ernance institutions and globalization more generally, we will need creative theorizing
and innovative practical recommendations if the principle is to be applied effectively,
since the modalities for giving a voice to the affected hardly exist at present. Recall that
the principle proposes that all those importantly affected by a decision or policy must
not only have their interests considered by policy-​makers but need to be heard from
regarding the impacts of these policies on their own needs or interests. But how can this
be realistically implemented at the transnational level? Some have suggested that demo-
cratic input can be facilitated by civil society organizations, which would represent the
interests of those affected, assuming these organizations could be made fully account-
able to those they aim to serve. And indeed, there has been some progress in giving
these organizations opportunities to raise concerns and propose policies, though most
often at the start of the discussions within global governance institutions, with the real
and effective decisions continuing to be made by the powerful states or non-​state actors
themselves. The civil society organizations are rarely given access to the backroom dis-
cussions that shape the actual policies that are adopted (IBON 2013). Clearly, more can
be done to give such organizations real influence within global governance institutions.
Additionally, these organizations would need to find ways to actually hear from their
constituencies. These reflections support the requirement to introduce more transpar-
ency into the functioning of the powerful institutions. To date, this transparency nor-
mally does not extend to the actual decision-​making processes, which largely transpire
out of the public eye.
Evidently, the requirements for human rights assessments, transparency, and input
from civil society organizations are not yet sufficient to adequately represent those
affected by the policies of the global governance institutions. What additional measures
could be advanced? Another modest direction that has already been implemented in
limited contexts are forums for dialogue and discursive representation of those affected,
whether online or off, in such a way that they can have some influence on the agenda and
the policies of these organizations. For example, NGOs can participate in International
Labor Organization (ILO) discussions, but only where relevant and by invitation,
although they play a somewhat more prominent role within the Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC) of the UN (Willetts 2011). Indeed, some of these NGOs have the
ability to propose items for the agenda. As we have seen, there are also a host of inter-
national and regional parliaments, with deliberative and advisory functions. Yet, these
various forms of participation and representation are consultative at best, and non-​
binding. The appointing of ombudspersons is another modest suggestion for represent-
ing those affected in the deliberations of the powerful institutions.
 Democracy and Global Governance    397

Beyond these measures, we can envision new forms of transnational representation

that give some real power, or at least influence, to representatives of the affected, who
would be elected by them. These representatives could be either standing and regular
ones, based on durable understandings of those likely to be affected; or they could be
introduced in more ad hoc ways in accordance with specific assessments about the pro-
spective effects of decisions or policies under consideration in global governance (Fung
2013). New forms of functional representation, e.g. organized within transnational eco-
nomic sectors, are another possible direction for the future. However, given the pres-
ent moves in a contrary direction, toward a renewed emphasis on states, innovations
along these various transnational lines are likely to take some time. Yet, inasmuch as
the current emphasis on states as the proper locus for potentially addressing workers’
and citizens’ grievances reflects a real lack of control that people feel over globalization
and its institutions, we can say that reforms in the interest of those affected are clearly
needed at both national and transnational levels. This implies that we should seek new
ways to introduce more substantive democracy, along with less deference to the power-
ful, as well as less bureaucratic management, both in global governance and in states
themselves.
Even with these various innovations, important groups of affected people will still
likely not be adequately represented. This applies not only to distant impoverished
groups but to labour itself, given the way that global governance institutions in their
very construction tend to favour wealthy states, along with multinational corporations
and finance capital. This suggests the need to rethink these very institutions themselves
and whether they may in fact need to be replaced by new ones that more fairly represent
the interests of labour as well as capital, of developing countries as well as the wealthy
ones. Such a transformation would seem especially necessary in regard to those insti-
tutions that concern economic governance, and the emerging ecological governance
(Dryzek and Stevenson 2011). Moreover, from the standpoint of democratic theory, rep-
resenting interests equally requires hearing from those affected, and not simply relying
on powerful elites to construct for themselves some account of the interests and needs of
those impacted by their decisions. Admittedly, calling for replacement of existing insti-
tutions by ones that are more fairly and democratically designed seems far-​fetched at
present. But this transformation may well be normatively required in order to enable
real democracy at the level of global governance.
Addressing the imbalance between wealthy and powerful decision-​makers and those
affected by their decisions can also take place by devolving some of the powers of the
relevant institutions to more local and democratically organized levels. This is already
occurring within national contexts at a small scale under the banner of participatory
budgeting, in which the power to allocate a part of the budget is given over to commu-
nity groups. Perhaps there are ways to implement such participatory budgeting at more
global scales. Of course, this would likely also require the introduction of new forms of
global taxation and transfers that go beyond the currently existing powers of institutions
to regulate trade disputes and to engage in lending and other financial transactions in
transnational contexts.
398   Carol C. Gould

Finally, an account of democracy and global governance would be incomplete with-

out attention to the crucial role played by social movements in initiating the required
democratic transformation both nationally and across borders. These movements
have called attention to the democratic and equality deficits that currently afflict state
and world politics and economics. They have also germinated new ways of organizing,
making decisions, and connecting institutions to each other, which can provide useful
directions for improving the democratic functioning of more established institutions.
Beyond the policy suggestions for reform that have arisen from within existing global
governance institutions, then, it is evident that the creativity and innovation of social
movements will be urgently needed in the time ahead.

References
Abizadeh, A. (2008). Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally
Control Your Own Borders. Political Theory 36(1): 37–​65.
Archibugi, D. (2008). The Global Commonwealth of Citizens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press).
Arendt, H. (1968 [1951]). The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
Brunkhorst, H. (2009). States with Constitutions, Constitutions without States, and
Democracy: Skeptical Reflections on Scheuerman’s Skeptical Reflection. Ethics & Global
Politics 2(1): 65–​81.
Cabrera, L. (2010). The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
Cohen, J. L. (2012). Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and
Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Dahbour, O. (2012). Self-​ Determination Without Nationalism: A Theory of Postnational
Sovereignty (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).
Dryzek, J. S., and H. Stevenson (2011). Global Democracy and Earth System Governance.
Ecological Economics 70: 1865–​74.
Fung, A. (2013). The Principle of Affected Interests and Inclusion in Democratic Governance. In
J. Nagel and R. Smith (eds), Representation: Elections and Beyond (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press), 236–​68.
Goodin, R. (2007). Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and its Alternatives. Philosophy &
Public Affairs 35(1): 40–​68.
Gould, C. C. (1988). Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics,
Economy, and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Gould, C. C. (2004). Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Gould, C. C. (2009). Structuring Global Democracy: Political Communities, Universal
Human rights, and Transnational Representation. Metaphilosophy 40(1): 24–​46.
Gould, C. C. (2012). Regional vs. Global Democracy: Advantages and Limitations. In D.
Archibugi, D. Koenig-​Archibugi, and R. Marchetti (eds), Global Democracy: Normative and
Empirical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 115–​31.
Gould, C. C. (2014). Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
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Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan
Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press).
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[Online; accessed 19 Apr. 2017.] http://​iboninternational.org/​sites/​ibon/​files/​resources/​
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Marchetti, R. (2012). Models of Global Democracy: In Defense of Cosmo-​Federalism. In D.
Archibugi, D. Koenig-​Archibugi, and R. Marchetti (eds), Global Democracy: Normative and
Empirical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 22–​45.
Miller, D. (1995). On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Miller, D. (2013). Justice for Earthlings (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Scholte, J. A. (2011). Building Global Democracy? Civil Society and Accountable Global
Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Walzer, M. (1977). Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books).
Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic
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Global Governance (London: Routledge).
 ­c hapter 30

Sovereignt y, De mo c rac y,
and Gl obal P ol i t i c a l
Legiti mac y

Terry MacDonald

Recent decades have witnessed burgeoning global political movements aimed at

strengthening the political legitimacy of global institutions. This push for stronger pol-
itical legitimacy—​understood in normative terms as political “support-​worthiness”
(Buchanan and Keohane 2006; Macdonald 2016)—​has been motivated in part by com-
mitment to many recognizably democratic values such as transparency, accountability
(see Chapter 34), inclusion, representation, deliberation, and empowerment. Yet more
direct talk of “global democracy” still attracts strongly sceptical responses. Much of this
scepticism stems from doubts about the feasibility of reconstructing familiar state-​based
democratic institutional models on a global scale (Dahl 1999; Grant and Keohane 2005;
Miller 2010; Wendt 1999), as envisaged by “cosmopolitan” (Held 1995; Archibugi 2008;
Cabrera 2005) and “transnationalist” (Macdonald 2008; Dryzek 2006; Bohman 2007)
democratic theorists. In response, global democrats have advanced mostly empirical
counter-​arguments, aimed at expanding estimations of what may in fact be politically
achievable (Koenig-​Archibugi 2010; List and Koenig-​Archibugi 2010).
In this chapter, I develop an alternative strategy for reconciling global democratic val-
ues with empirical facts about the structure and dynamics of contemporary global gov-
ernance. Instead of disputing sceptics’ empirical claims about real-​world obstacles to
cosmopolitan and transnationalist democratic institutional models, I challenge some
implicit normative assumptions underlying their arguments. These assumptions con-
cern the sources of political legitimacy within democratic institutions, and the range of
realizable global institutional forms that should thereby count as democratic.
More specifically, I argue that the normative theories of democracy invoked in
debates about global democracy construe the institutional ingredients of democracy’s
political legitimacy too narrowly: they focus on contributions to political legitimacy
made by institutions of democratic social choice-​making, such as elections and public
 Global Political Legitimacy    401

deliberative structures, while neglecting those made by institutionalized governance

capabilities, of the kind historically embodied in sovereign states. When problems of
democratic institutional design arise within sovereign states, the narrow focus on
democratic choice-​making institutions matters little, since the availability of adequate
material governance capacities can be taken for granted as a theoretical background
condition. But this narrow focus becomes problematic when we are concerned instead
with institutional design problems at the global level, where key governance functions
of sovereign institutions are weak or absent. To understand the institutional prerequis-
ites for political legitimacy within a global democracy, I argue that we therefore need
to build and apply a broader theoretical understanding of political legitimacy that can
more systematically account for its governance capability dimensions. And when we do
so, we are pointed towards revised institutional prescriptions for global democratiza-
tion that conform much more closely to established sceptical assessments of what may
be politically realizable.
In what follows I develop this argument in several steps, and explore its implications
for our broader theoretical understandings of the relationships among sovereignty,
democracy, and global political legitimacy. In the first section, I elaborate the distinc-
tion between the “choice-​making” and “governance capability” dimensions of political
legitimacy within democratic institutions. I further explain how democratic theories
have evolved to focus too narrowly on the former, as a result of their historical preoccu-
pation with the study of democratic states. In the second section, I highlight some intui-
tive grounds for thinking that material governance capability in fact constitutes a crucial
substantive ingredient in the democratic legitimacy of global governance institutions,
alongside democratic choice-​making. In the third section, I sketch the outline of a
broader theoretical understanding of political legitimacy, which can better account for
its governance capability dimensions in non-​sovereign institutional contexts. In conclu-
sion, I point to some implications of these theoretical arguments for global institutional
design, and the realizability of projects of global democratization.

Choice-​M aking Process vs Governance

Capability as Sources of Political
Legitimacy

The idea of political legitimacy is central to the normative analysis of democratic insti-
tutions, insofar as the justifying purpose of democracy is widely understood to be that
of legitimizing governance institutions. Here legitimacy is a standard of acceptability—​
that is to say, a standard denoting that an institution warrants support, without neces-
sarily conforming perfectly to some moral ideal such as justice (Buchanan and Keohane
1996; Macdonald 2016). In much democratic theory the idea of political legitimacy sits
in the background, with a focus instead on questions about what democracy is (in terms
402   Terry MacDonald

of competing conceptions or fundamental principles) or how it can best be institution-

alized (in terms of competing institutional models). But underlying these conceptual
and institutional arguments are claims about the democratic sources of political legit-
imacy: what it is about democratic institutions, in other words, that makes them war-
rant support. Arguments for or against competing conceptions or institutional models
all need to refer back to substantive understandings about the sources of political legit-
imacy to ground their justificatory claims.
Theoretical arguments about the sources of political legitimacy in democratic insti-
tutions are complex and diverse, and I cannot survey them here. But for present pur-
poses it is enough to highlight one feature that most share in common: they locate the
sources of political legitimacy in processes of democratic social choice-​making. By
this, I mean those processes through which the content of collective political decisions
is institutionally articulated—​for instance, through elections or deliberative decision-​
making. Democratic theorists have identified sources of political legitimacy in a range
of constitutive principles for social choice-​making—​typically focused on constituting
choice-​making in a way that inclusively (Goodin 2007; Young 2002), equally (Barry
1991; Beitz 1989), and rationally (Knight and Johnson 1994; Benhabib 1994) reflects the
shared political values of some democratic collective. These choice-​making principles,
in turn, articulate an interpretation of the broader political value of collective self-​
determination, which is central to the democratic project.
The problem with these social choice-​focused democratic accounts of political legit-
imacy is that they cannot account for powerful intuitions that the political legitimacy
of democratic institutions derives in part from the value of their functional governance
capabilities. By this, I mean institutions’ capabilities for supporting those forms of social
coordination, control, and resource allocation that are required to advance materially
the shared political values of democratic collectives. Such governance capabilities are
prerequisites for advancing a wide range of political values and goals—​including those
articulated within democratic social choice processes. As such, they are essential for any
materially realizable democratic project of collective self-​determination. Within demo-
cratic theory, however, the functional characteristics of such governance capabilities are
not systematically analysed as substantive ingredients in the constitution of political
legitimacy. Rather, they are recognized as ingredients in political legitimacy only deriva-
tively: either as instruments for implementing particular democratic choices after they
have already been legitimately made; or as constituents in democratic choice-​making,
in the form of coercively backed protections for practices of political inclusion, equality,
and rationalized social choice.
The idea that material governance capabilities may be independent ingredients in
normative political legitimacy resonates more strongly with some recent sociological
theories, which differentiate “output” and “input” sources of political legitimacy
(Scharpf 1999; 2003). Given the pervasiveness of this input/​output distinction within
current political analysis, it is worth briefly clarifying its relationship to the two dimen-
sions of political legitimacy I am distinguishing here. The concepts of input and output
legitimacy are deployed mostly in explanatory sociological analysis—​to differentiate
 Global Political Legitimacy    403

two types of evaluative judgement that motivate political support for institutions. But
some theorists have argued that these judgement types map onto an underlying dis-
tinction between two sources of normative political legitimacy. In normative analysis,
“input” legitimacy focuses on the value of those political processes—​including, cru-
cially, democratic choice-​making processes—​that feed into and steer the activities of
democratic institutions. “Output” legitimacy, in contrast, focuses on the value of gov-
ernance outcomes that institutions produce—​or in other words, the “common interests”
or “common goods” that they materially advance (Scharpf 1999; 2003; Steffek 2015).
At first glance, it may appear that my distinction between choice-​making and govern-
ance capability dimensions of normative political legitimacy is equivalent to this famil-
iar input/​output distinction. Descriptively, democratic choice-​making processes do
supply some substantive “inputs” into the activities of democratic institutions; and nor-
matively, these choice-​making processes are often evaluated for substantive character-
istics of this input (such as its structural inclusivity, equity, and rationality) rather than
beneficial effects. Conversely, strong material governance capability is often descrip-
tively correlated with (and can help to produce) valuable institutional “outputs,” and is
commonly attributed normative value on this basis.
However, both choice-​making and governance capability dimensions of demo-
cratic institutions can also be described and evaluated the other way around—​viewing
choice-​making processes in output terms, and governance capability in input terms—​if
different normative criteria are applied. On the one hand, democratic choice-​making
processes can be viewed descriptively as outputs of wider institutional schemes—​
insofar as they have ongoing social preconditions that wider institutional schemes can
either support or erode. Correspondingly, they can be evaluated in output terms for
their wider political consequences—​as they are in many instrumental arguments for
and against democracy. On the other hand, institutions’ governance capabilities can
be descriptively viewed as “inputs,” insofar as they are constituted by ongoing contri-
butions of resources, compliance, and other forms of material support from political
agents. And in normative terms, it is not at all clear why we should assume that they
are best evaluated in terms of the “outputs” they produce, rather than (like democratic
choice-​making) in terms of the motivational inputs that drive these materially support-
ive actions. These in fact are precisely the kinds of normative questions I am raising
here—​and they are obscured, rather than answered, by the question-​begging applica-
tion of the “output” legitimacy label.
If these normative questions are not settled within established accounts of “output”
legitimacy, then, what could account for their theoretical neglect? That is, why have demo-
cratic theorists not developed more systematic normative arguments about whether and
on what basis governance capability is a substantive ingredient of political legitimacy? My
suggestion is that democratic theorists have neglected these questions because of their
historical preoccupation with the study of democratic states. Historically, democratic
theories have mostly assumed that governance capabilities are constituted in the form
of state sovereignty—​understood broadly as hierarchical rule-​based political author-
ity backed by control of force in a territory. Sometimes sovereignty is thought to be the
404   Terry MacDonald

appropriate governance framework for democratic politics on the basis that states have
been the dominant form of political organization prompting democratic claims against
them (Dewey 1927). Sometimes sovereignty is justified on strategic or moral grounds (or
both) as the governance framework that democratic publics have strongest reasons to
choose (Rawls 1996). But either way, the assumption of sovereignty as a theoretical back-
ground condition has enabled democrats to bracket normative questions about govern-
ance capabilities as exogenous to the democratic theory of political legitimacy.
Sovereignty and democracy have thus co-​evolved as densely intertwined institu-
tional models, nested together to form the overarching institutional systems of demo-
cratic states. The democratic theory of political legitimacy has maintained a focus on
choice-​making processes by assuming that they can simply be established as institu-
tional “add-​ons” to sovereign governance structures that are independently justified in
some acceptable way. We can say that theories of democratic legitimacy have evolved to
piggyback on justificatory arguments concerning state sovereignty, rather than expli-
citly incorporating their normative content as elements of their theory of political
legitimacy.1 In the context of contemporary global politics, however, there is neither
any operational global sovereign, nor any wide agreement on what an alternative jus-
tified framework of global governance institutions should look like. Under these cir-
cumstances, the democratic theory of legitimacy has no settled justificatory framework
upon which to piggyback, and must instead tackle normative questions about govern-
ance capabilities within the democratic theory of political legitimacy itself.

Governance Capability as an
Ingredient of Global Political
Legitimacy

So far, I have argued that democratic theory has evolved without an adequate account
of how the value of institutions’ governance capabilities should be taken into account
in assessment of their political legitimacy. But before we can consider how to account
for this, it is first necessary to say more about why such an account is required. The nor-
mative case for recognizing valuable governance capabilities as substantive ingredients
in political legitimacy can be appreciated most readily, I propose, by reflecting on intu-
itions about what political legitimacy requires in global institutions. This is illuminating
because when theoretical analysis is focused on the institutional complex of the demo-
cratic state—​in which democratic choice-​making processes and state governance func-
tions are operationally intertwined—​it can be difficult to draw out clear intuitions about
where exactly the political legitimacy is coming from. But when we instead examine
global governance contexts in which these institutional elements are unbundled, some
of the tensions and trade-​offs between democratic choice-​making and valuable govern-
ance capabilities are brought into clearer focus.
 Global Political Legitimacy    405

To draw out these intuitions, we can start by considering how global governance
institutions differ from sovereign institutions with respect to their governance cap-
abilities. Here we must first recognize the limited governance capabilities of sovereign
institutions—​which are centred on rule-​making and enforcement capabilities. The
functional specificity of states is sometimes obscured by traditional theoretical charac-
terizations of sovereignty as “absolute” or “ultimate” power or authority within a terri-
tory, which imply openness with respect to the functions that sovereign institutions can
perform. But this is misleading insofar as the state’s hierarchical legal and bureaucratic
authority, backed by its material capacities for force and coercion, constitute blunt regu-
latory tools. They can motivate only a limited range of behaviours, and correspondingly
perform a limited range of functions. This recognition is backed by recent empirical lit-
eratures, which show how the functional capabilities of institutions vary with their dis-
tinctive mechanisms for achieving social coordination, control, and resource allocation
(Rhodes 1996)—​focusing in particular on differences between institutional hierarchies
such as states, and the non-​state institutional forms of markets and networks.
Growing appreciation for the diverse functional capabilities of non-​state institutions
has been influential in shaping the development of contemporary global governance
institutions. In contrast to the coercive rule-​enforcement functions of states, many glo-
bal governance functions involve softer forms of collaborative political action—​such as
information creation and exchange, the promulgation of informal regulatory principles,
and problem-​solving around particular issue areas (Finkelstein 1995). To sustain these
functions, many global institutions demand forms of actor autonomy, operational flexi-
bility and agility, informational accumulation and exchange, and so on, which cannot be
achieved optimally through hierarchical institutional structures alone. Meeting these
demands requires a greater role for market and network mechanisms—​incorporating
a range of non-​state actors such as corporations and non-​governmental organizations
(NGOs) alongside states and international organizations (IOs) (Cutler, Haufler, and
Porter 1999).
Moreover, while some global governance functions are complementary, others con-
flict—​since there is no universal agreement on what constitutes the global “common
interest” or “common good.” As such, global governance institutions are organized
around more local and partial agreements, arising from a complex web of interlock-
ing and shifting transnational constituencies. Dense and dynamic interactions among
these plural institutions then generate an overarching governance structure that can
be described as “complex” (Weiss and Wilkinson 2014) and in some aspects “liquid”
(Krisch 2017; Macdonald and Macdonald 2017) in character.
What, then, are the implications of these complex non-​hierarchical institutional
forms for political legitimacy in global governance? The crucial implication, I propose,
is that they radically diminish the scope of the political control that democratic choice-​
making processes can exercise over governance activities. This loss of political control
has two main sources. First, whereas political control within a hierarchical sovereign
institutional structure is concentrated in a small number of sites of decision-​making
authority—​typically legislatures, executives, and judiciaries—​control is diffused within
406   Terry MacDonald

global governance institutions across a proliferation of diverse actors and institutional

settings. This diffusion characterizes both the processes through which political actors
express and coordinate values (e.g. purchasing decisions in markets, or negotiations
within networks), and the processes through which these values are converted into pol-
itical outcomes through the operation of institutional power (e.g. through the pressures
of material incentives and rewards channelled through markets, or those of the material
interdependencies and forms of socialization that develop within networks). As a result
of this diffusion, many institutions lack a clear institutional focal point or “setting” for
the exercise of political control, where established democratic decision-​making prin-
ciples of inclusion, equality, or rationality (in the form of rational preference aggrega-
tion or public deliberation) could be “plugged in.”
Second, the political control that can be exercised through democratic choice-​
making processes is further restricted by the more opaque character of the activities
through which political values are expressed within complex non-​hierarchical govern-
ance. Within a hierarchical sovereign institutional structure, political control is typic-
ally channelled through legal and bureaucratic processes, in which political values are
clearly expressed through the explicit articulation and contestation of authoritative
rules, directives, or principles. In contrast, the processes of control that drive functions
within complex non-​hierarchical global governance institutions embody more ambigu-
ous expressions of political value.
For instance, the spending and investment activities that drive the functions of par-
ticular market institutions—​such as economic “supply chain” institutions (Macdonald
2014)—​are often weaker indicators of actors’ political values, insofar as they are rou-
tinely undertaken without access to adequate information about their wider political
implications. Similarly, the incremental activities that shape the development of net-
work relationships—​to share or not share information and resources, to honour or
renege on informally negotiated commitments, and so on—​can be significantly shaped
by local norms and accountabilities that develop within and sustain these relation-
ships (Papadopoulos 2007), thus obscuring the wider political values that spurred net-
work participation in the first place. When political values are expressed in these more
opaque ways, the scope of democratic choice-​making control diminishes insofar as it
becomes unclear what activities should count as political “choices,” and thereby be sub-
ject to democratic choice-​making principles of inclusivity, equality, and rationality.
Established arguments from cosmopolitan and transnationalist global democrats can
offer some responses to these concerns. Cosmopolitans claim that such existing demo-
cratic legitimacy deficits necessitate developing hierarchical state-​like governmental
structures on a global scale, more amenable to control through democratic choice-​mak-
ing processes (Cabrera 2005). Transnationalists claim that political control through
democratic choice-​making can be restored within non-​hierarchical governance struc-
tures through creative redesign of democratic choice-​making mechanisms—​such as
flexible new forms of deliberative engagement (Dryzek 2006), non-​electoral representa-
tion (Macdonald 2008), or participation (Warren 2002). Remaining political legitimacy
deficits are then treated as concessions to a methodological “realism,” captured by the
 Global Political Legitimacy    407

idea that complex global governance is an empirical fact to which democratic institu-
tions and their justifications must respond.2
But these responses do not adequately account for the deep normative tensions and
trade-​offs that underlie choices among these institutional alternatives. In advocating the
construction of sovereign-​style global institutions, cosmopolitans fail to acknowledge
the strong functional values that support existing non-​hierarchical global governance
structures. While there are certainly many drivers for the existing global governance
structure—​including the pressures of strategic power politics—​one central driver is
the widespread view that hierarchical governance is functionally ill-​equipped to solve
complex global problems. Transnationalists similarly advance few direct normative
arguments in support of non-​hierarchical global governance institutions, notwith-
standing their willingness to adapt democratic choice-​making institutions to their
structural demands. By casting concessions to non-​hierarchical institutional structures
as responses to feasibility constraints, they downplay the extent to which they may in
fact respond to normative demands for the discharge of valuable governance functions.
In sum, there are strong intuitive grounds for thinking that the functional value of
governance capabilities should be accommodated, alongside the democratic char-
acter of choice-​making processes, in overall assessments of political legitimacy. But
established democratic theories of political legitimacy provide no clear account of the
criteria by which the value of governance capabilities should be judged, in lieu of judge-
ments expressed through democratic choice-​making processes. As a result, they can-
not explain how trade-​offs should be made between an institution’s valuable governance
functions and its democratic choice-​making controls, when their institutional demands
conflict. The need for a normative account of this kind raises an important challenge to
which global democratic theorists must respond.

Global Political Legitimacy in a Post-​

Sovereign Era: A New Research Agenda

Although established democratic theories incorporate no systematic account of the

governance capability dimension of political legitimacy, broader theoretical traditions
of liberalism, republicanism, realism, and pragmatism have said more about it. Often
they have done so in arguing for sovereign institutions as a politically legitimate frame-
work for democratic politics.3 But the problem with these arguments from a democratic
perspective is that they all appeal to substantive values that are not globally shared. As
such, appeal to these values as sources of political legitimacy cannot readily be recon-
ciled with the central democratic value of collective self-​determination.
Some liberals and republicans, first, have argued that political legitimacy requires spe-
cial material governance capabilities that are functionally independent from democratic
choice-​making in order to protect some purported “common interest” from capture
408   Terry MacDonald

by self-​interested public officials or special interest groups. Often these capabilities are
prescribed in the form of constitutional structures, institutionally insulated from direct
control by democratic legislatures or executives. Typically the content of this “common
interest”—​and thereby of political legitimacy more broadly—​is given by the application
of some principles of justice (Valentini 2012), or “thinner” moral principles (Buchanan
and Keohane 2006; Erman 2015) that are backed by philosophical justifications. But it
is not clear how the institutionalization of such moral standards can be reconciled with
the democratic value of collective self-​determination within global populations among
whom these standards are themselves matters of deep political disagreement.
Others have argued that political legitimacy requires special governance capabilities
that are functionally independent from democratic choice-​making to support political
“problem-​solving” activities. Conceptions of political “problems” vary, but include the
problem of “order” emphasized by theoretical “realists” like Williams (2005), and prob-
lems understood in “pragmatic experimentalist” terms as targets of politically collab-
orative experimental inquiry and action (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008; De Burca, Keohane,
and Sabel 2014). This problem-​solving approach provides more scope for achieving
democratic political legitimacy under conditions of moral disagreement, and as such
is suggestive and important. But normative criteria for diagnosing and solving global
problems can also attract deep political contestation—​albeit on different justificatory
terms from moral disputes. Some authors invoke problem-​solving standards of “effect-
iveness” (Gutner and Thompson 2010), or broader epistemic standards (Steffek 2015),
as alternatives to controversial moral principles. But instrumental and epistemic stand-
ards can only supplement—​not substitute for—​thicker normative criteria specifying
what kind of problem-​solving strategies should be “effectively” pursued. And it remains
unclear how these criteria can be identified without appeal either to politically contested
moral principles or to democratic choice-​making processes.
How then can democrats account for widespread intuitions about the importance of
governance capability to political legitimacy, given these problems with established the-
oretical arguments? Here I propose another promising theoretical framework for this
task, which identifies support for institutions’ governance capability as one element of a
normative conception of political legitimacy centred on advancing collective empower-
ment. The value of collective empowerment is closely related to that of collective self-​
determination. But whereas familiar democratic conceptions of self-​determination are
formulated as ideals of empowered collective choice-​making, as discussed above, the
conception I am proposing here is formulated as an ideal of empowered collective action
more broadly conceived (Macdonald 2015; 2016; Macdonald and Macdonald 2017).
This shift in conceptualization helpfully accommodates the claim that shared political
values—​or “common interests”—​can be expressed in various political activities beyond
democratic “choice-​making.” This claim is that political values are not always expressed
communicatively—​in the form of explicitly articulated normative “principles” or “con-
ceptions,” such as moral or problem-​solving standards. Rather, they are often expressed
behaviourally—​through the patterns of value-​responsive activity that constitute insti-
tutional “practices.” The idea that social practices embody some non-​propositional
 Global Political Legitimacy    409

knowledge is already well established (Taylor 1985); and some recent normative theor-
ists have argued that political value judgement can be similarly practice-​based (Geuss
2009; Philp 2007). Value judgements can be regarded as practice-​based insofar as they
are produced in part through non-​cognitive evaluative faculties such as attentional
and emotional responsiveness, and politically expressed through conduct alongside
communication.
Recognizing the practice-​based constituents of political values can help us to move
past the problems with established theoretical accounts of the governance capabil-
ity dimension of political legitimacy, discussed above. It can do so by opening up a
new avenue for analysis of “common interests” in the absence of their articulation
through formal communicative mechanisms such as public deliberation or voting (see
Chapter 33). The basic idea is that institutional practices can embody shared political
values expressed behaviourally by their participants through ongoing patterns of mater-
ial support for institutions—​even when participants do not agree, in cognitive or com-
municative terms, on substantive moral principles or problem-​solving criteria for these
institutions. When institutional participants lend support through their joint partici-
pation to the production and maintenance of some material set of institutional govern-
ance capabilities, they express at the very least shared value placed on these capabilities
themselves—​even if different participants consider them worthy of support on the basis
of competing strategic goals or moral principles. The content of the governance capabil-
ities that should be regarded as ingredients in political legitimacy can then be identified
theoretically through critical interpretation of institutional practice, as a supplement to
agreements reached through democratic choice-​making processes.
To realize the potential of this theoretical account, more work must be done to develop
it in both conceptual and institutional dimensions. First, democrats need to develop
more robust practice-​based conceptions of collective action and collective empower-
ment, able to generate methods of analysis for interpreting institutional practices, and
discerning the ways and degrees to which such practices can be understood as expressive
of non-​cognitive value judgements as distinct from realpolitik political pressures. This
can enable assessment of how non-​choice-​driven global governance practices—​such as
the market and network governance practices discussed earlier—​reflect “common inter-
ests” of the kind that can supply substantive standards of global political legitimacy in
the governance capability dimension. More must also be said about how the boundaries
of practices can be delineated within “complex” and “liquid” institutional contexts such
as those in contemporary global politics. On both issues we may benefit from insights in
practice-​based critical and social theories of collective action (e.g. Joas 1996; Boltanski
and Thevenou 2006), as well as new methodological work aimed at understanding how
the normative principles that regulate institutions should depend on empirical features
of underlying social practices (Williams 2005; Floyd 2016; Ronzoni 2009; Sangiovanni
2008; Williams and Warren 2014).
In addition, democrats need to develop new institutional principles and prescriptions
for fostering political legitimacy understood as empowered collective action, tailored to
diverse global governance contexts. At the centre of any new institutional agenda must
410   Terry MacDonald

be protections for political collaborations driven by practice-​based—​as well as formal

choice-​based—​shared political judgements. More concretely, this may lend demo-
cratic support to a three-​pronged institutional programme: strengthened emphasis on
institutionalized human rights protection, justified as core international instruments
for broad political empowerment; renewed focus on institutionalizing material social
and economic empowerments, alongside empowered social choice; and recognition
of contextually variable standards of political legitimacy within global institutions, to
accommodate the varying governance functions that achieve political support in prac-
tice in each institutional case. In developing this institutional agenda, democrats can
build upon republican and realist ideas (see Chapters 47 and 48) about the import-
ance of institutionalized “non-​domination” in creating space for empowered polit-
ical agency (Buckinx, Trejo-​Mathys, and Waligore 2015; Pettit 2010), as well as wider
bodies of work on political empowerment (Fung 2006) and global political legitimacy
(Buchanan 2010).
It remains an open question whether this collective-​empowerment conception of glo-
bal political legitimacy is best formulated as a straightforwardly “democratic” theory,
or in more conceptually freestanding terms. To accept it as democratic we would need
to be conceptually flexible in how we formulate the democratic conceptions of political
empowerment and equality, in particular. But by maintaining a focus on the empower-
ment of collective agency—​rather than imposing moral or epistemic conceptions of the
common good lacking global political acceptance—​this way of thinking about the gov-
ernance capability dimensions of global political legitimacy resonates more strongly
than other established alternatives with democratic ideals. As such, it has the poten-
tial to help us better understand the democratic sources of political legitimacy in global
governance contexts where institutional decision-​making is structured in ways incom-
patible with traditional democratic choice-​making principles.

Conclusions

I began this chapter with the question of how democrats should respond to the charge
that democratizing global political institutions is utopian or infeasible, and I want to
return to that question briefly in conclusion. Whereas the charge of utopianism gen-
erally presupposes state-​like cosmopolitan institutional models to embody the global
democratic “ideal,” to be assessed for feasibility, I have presented here an analysis of
the democratic sources of political legitimacy that opposes this framing supposition.
Instead, I have argued that many of the non-​sovereign global governance institutions
that democratic sceptics cite as obstacles to realizing global democracy may be bet-
ter viewed as substantive ingredients in it, insofar as they contribute to the substantive
functional value produced through global governance activity—​as this is understood
by the mix of global actors by and for whom such institutions are constituted. At least
 Global Political Legitimacy    411

to the extent that we see democratic institutional ideals as oriented towards achieving
normative political legitimacy (as distinct from justice, or some other substantive moral
or epistemic standard), there are thus good normative reasons for opening up familiar
theoretical and institutional models of democracy for substantial revision.
This rethinking of the relationship between democracy and political legitimacy also
contributes new insights to longstanding theoretical debates about the democratic value
of sovereignty as a central institution in international politics. Whereas democratic the-
orists have conventionally attributed value to sovereign institutions on the basis that
they can provide the most hospitable institutional framework for mechanisms of demo-
cratic collective choice (Miller 2010), my arguments here suggest that sovereign insti-
tutions can also contribute more directly to democratic projects through the political
legitimacy that their special governance capabilities can confer. A central challenge for
democrats in the era of post-​sovereign global governance, therefore, is to assess how the
choice-​making and governance capability dimensions of political legitimacy can best be
weighed and reconciled, and on this basis to develop creative new institutional designs
with greater sensitivity to these competing demands.

Notes
1. For an influential discussion of the relationship between questions of state “legitimacy” and
“justification,” see Simmons (1999).
2. Transnationalists’ gestures towards political realism mirror those underlying a broader the-
oretical literature on democracy in non-​hierarchical governance (Fung 2006; Sorensen and
Torfing 2016).
3. Broader arguments of this kind are surveyed by Scharpf (2003) in his analysis of “output”
legitimacy, though for reasons outlined earlier I do not invoke that language here.

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 ­c hapter 31

The Ethical L i mi ts of
Gl obal Demo c rac y

Eva Erman

The target entities of democracy promotion to date have been states. But what about
promoting global democracy? In contrast to the broad consensus on the value of pro-
moting democracy as the best political system for states, it is much more contested
whether we should promote democracy also in global governance and if so under what
conditions (see Chapter 29). Adding a normative aspect to that: what has International
Political Theory (IPT) got to say about the ethical limits of global democracy? This is the
question addressed in the present chapter.
The ethical limits of global democracy will here be understood as the conditions
under which global democracy should be construed (formulated and justified) and
promoted in real politics. Of course, these two questions are deeply intertwined, since
whether global democracy should be promoted depends on what account of global
democracy we favour. However, the aim here is not to develop and defend a substantive
account of global democracy, but to bring up and discuss some basic concerns that are
essential to address when analysing the limits of global democracy as well as to suggest
some fruitful ways to approach them.
In light of this general theoretical aim, a permissive characterization of the concept of
“global democracy” will be applied, according to which global democracy alludes to dif-
ferent forms of democracy “beyond” the state, in regional and global governance, such
as international organizations in which non-​state actors are also involved. This may
include cosmopolitan approaches to global democracy, stakeholder and civil society
approaches, federal world state approaches, intergovernmentalist approaches, or differ-
ent forms of multi-​layered governance. The basic question explored in the chapter con-
cerns the conditions under which global democracy on any of those construals may be
justified and fostered.
 The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy    415

The Limits of Global Democracy

and Empirical Concerns

We may of course have many reasons to limit global democracy that are not of immedi-
ate interest for IPT. Since the basic question in this chapter is normative, concerned with
the ethical limits of global democracy, relevant constraints on global democracy will
primarily be set by fundamental empirical and moral concerns.1 While this section ana-
lyses the former, the subsequent section focuses on the latter.

Empirical Constraints on the Construal

of Global Democracy
When thinking about the ideal of democracy in a global context, a first set of empir-
ical concerns has to do with feasibility constraints, that is, limitations of what can be
achieved in the real world. While an inquiry into what global democracy would be in a
world fundamentally different from our world—​e.g. a world of angels—​may be a worth-
while task for philosophy, what we are interested in as political theorists is feasibility
constraints in the world as we know it. At the same time, it seems ill-​fitting to constrain
global democracy by what we are likely to do within the foreseeable future, or even what
we are likely to do at all. For while history is a good judge on what is possible, it is not the
last word on what is impossible (Dennett 1994: 105). The often persistent, lengthy, and
difficult struggles against oppression and injustices in history have shown that very few
of the victories for democracy have ever been likely. Quite the opposite: they have more
often than not been perceived as almost impossible (Erman and Möller 2013: 37). The
important point for the limits of global democracy is this: if we interpreted “can” in the
principle of “ought implies can” in terms of “reasonably likely,” we would not only take
away the very potential for rightful change that is at the heart of our concern, but also
put up arbitrary constraints on our formulation and justification of global democracy
(Erman and Möller 2013: 38; Estlund 2008: 264).
Therefore, against the utopian approach of working without feasibility constraints
(a world of angels) and the realist approach of working from the constraint of likeli-
hood (cf. Galston 2010; Geuss 2008; see Chapter 48), a more attractive framework for
construing global democracy suggests that regulative principles of global democracy
should be compatible with the basic features of human nature as we know it, as well as
being possible to achieve from the status quo (Buchanan 2004; Gilabert and Lawford-​
Smith 2012).2 The latter constraint means that there must be some way of reaching the
possible global democratic world from our world.3
416   Eva Erman

Now, it might be objected that these feasibility constraints are too permissive if we
engage in non-​ideal theory, which is a mode of theorizing that does not ask the ideal-​
theoretical question of what global democracy is but instead seeks to respond to the
question of what concrete step we should take from where we are now—​under the cur-
rent social, cultural, economic, and political conditions—​to make the global order more
democratic. In the theoretical literature on global democracy, especially in approaches
focusing on stakeholders and civil society actors, a frequently mentioned example of
such a step is to demand of international organizations such as WTO to include trans-
national actors in decision-​making (Macdonald 2008; Dryzek 2006; Scholte 2014).
From this standpoint, feasibility constraints must correspond much more to what eco-
nomic and political resources are available in the current situation as well as to how
motivated central actors are to achieve more democracy on the global level.
This is true, as far as it goes. But I insist that we carefully distinguish between empir-
ical reasons for putting constraints on the construal of global democracy (discussed here)
and empirical reasons for putting constraints on the promotion and realization of global
democracy (discussed below). When we wish to promote or realize an ideal or higher-​level
principle of global democracy, it seems reasonable to work under much stricter feasibil-
ity constraints, since then the aim is to theorize applied principles that are supposed to
regulate our concrete and actually existing global governance institutions under current
unfavourable conditions.4 But this is fully compatible with the suggested permissive feasi-
bility constraints for theorizing higher-​level principles of global democracy. The latter con-
straints give us the normative wiggle room needed to avoid a status quo bias and to utilize
idealizations and stylized hypothetical scenarios to reflect upon our considered judge-
ments. For sure, idealizations are falsehoods (O’Neill 1996: 41), but properly used they are
not supposed to be part of a theory, but rather used as evidence in support of a theory (e.g.
Rawls’s original position). Insofar as the theory fits with our considered judgements under
these idealized scenarios, this speaks in favour of the theory (see List and Valentini 2016).
A second set of empirical concerns that is fundamental for limiting our construal of
global democracy has to do with an ideal or principle of global democracy itself being
dependent on the practice to which it is intended to apply. In other words, in order to
know whether a principle of global democracy is even applicable, we need empirical
data about the practice that is supposed to be regulated by it. In the case of global dem-
ocracy, such practices will usually be in the form of institutions (although not necessar-
ily exclusively so).
A common presumption, stressed for example by practice-​dependent theorists,
is that the content and justification of a regulative principle depends on the structure,
form, and aim of the practice that the principle is intended to govern. For this reason,
proponents argue, we need to conduct a thoroughgoing interpretation of the nature of
the practice or institution in question, including its point and purpose according to the
participants, its public rules and norms, its history, and so on (Sangiovanni 2016; James
2012; Ronzoni 2009).
But these practice-​dependent constraints seem questionable. Whether or not a prac-
tice should become democratic (or, say, just) depends on what kind of practice it is. It
 The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy    417

might be the case that a commitment to a higher-​level principle of equal respect for per-
sons demands of us to abolish a practice, rather than asking which principles of democ-
racy are most fitting to regulate it. There is an unfortunate practice-​dependent bias in the
literature on global democracy, where it is often presumed that current institutionalized
practices are a necessary starting point for our normative inquiry. Take, for example,
the discussion about the role of private–​public partnerships in global governance, in
which a contract is set up between a private party and a public authority. It is often asked
how such partnerships can contribute to the democratization of global politics (see e.g.
Bexell and Mörth 2010). A more fundamental question, however, is whether multi-
national corporations should have power to influence the decision-​making in global
governance in the first place. In this and similar cases, normative political theory runs
the risk of becoming captive of current political practices in ways that lead to indefens-
ible regulative principles and erroneous prescriptions.
There seems to be a conflation of ontological and epistemological issues here, where
(reasonable) ontological dependencies are conflated with (unreasonable) epistemo-
logical dependencies. Theorists committed to practice-​dependence are heavily influ-
enced by Rawls’s constraining condition on normative principles, according to which
“the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of each thing”
(Rawls 1971: 29). This ontological condition, however, is taken by these theorists to entail
a requirement to find the best interpretation of the nature of our practices in order to
justify our principles. But this epistemological requirement is not supported by the
ontological condition (Erman and Möller 2017).
It is uncontroversial that all principles of global democracy require contextual infor-
mation about the practices they are supposed to regulate. But the ontological condition
says the following: since regulative principles are supposed to regulate the conduct and
structure of a practice, any candidate principle for this practice must be “formulated in
such a way that it satisfies a condition of applicability” (Beitz 2014: 227). To put it differ-
ently, in order for a normative principle to be a principle for a certain practice, it must
be compatible with that practice. So if we construed a principle of democracy for the
EU which in its application required a world government, it would not be a principle for
the EU. However, to get such contextual information does not require that the theorist
engages in thoroughgoing interpretation of the nature of the practice or institution in
question, its point and purpose according to the participants, and so on.
In fact, since the ontological condition only requires compatibility, it stays neutral
with regard to whether we abandon the principle or the practice. Take again the EU. Let
us assume that we construe a principle of democracy for the EU, but that it turns out that
applying this principle demands a fiscal union. Assume further that someone claimed
that the principle then is incompatible with the EU since a fiscal union is beyond the EU
as a political practice. Then it is of course up to the theorist to argue that this just means
that we should change the EU into a fiscal union, regardless of whether we would have
to rename it “the EU+” instead of “the EU” to do so. Whether or not this is a viable move
depends on our viewpoint (Erman and Möller forthcoming).
418   Eva Erman

With this in mind, what would be an appropriate condition of applicability of the

higher-​level principles of global democracy? While such principles are supposed to
regulate the exercise of purposeful public power in the global domain—​it must be pur-
poseful in order to be agent-​centric, and thus be possible to hold to account (Hurrell
and Macdonald 2012)—​it seems inapt to claim that any exercise of public power over
persons would be a fitting subject of principles of global democracy, such that dem-
ocracy is applicable, for example, in all contexts in which people’s interests are signifi-
cantly affected (Goodin 2007; Gould 2004). Although I cannot defend it here, I think it
is more fruitful to view democracy as a more limited political ideal, the aim of which is
to regulate public affairs through law-​and policy-​making (Erman 2016). “Democracy,”
on a rather established understanding, alludes to a political entity in which the rules
that govern it are taken by those to whom the rules apply. Principles of democracy are
intended to regulate the relationship between what may be broadly categorized as “rule-​
makers” (political entities) and “rule-​takers” (political subjects)—​i.e. between political
entities that make the rules and the subjects to whom these rules apply (Buchanan 2010;
Valentini 2012b)—​where rule-​making in a democratic context is equated with law-​and
policy-​making (Buchanan and Keohane 2006; Christiano 2013).
To see the plausibility of this view, imagine instead that we applied principles of global
democracy on political entities that were not law-​or policy-​makers—​for example, enti-
ties that enforce international law such as international courts like ICC, or global admin-
istrative bodies such as informal intergovernmental regulatory networks. To argue for a
principle of equal say in the decision-​making in these cases looks indefensible.
What distinguishes the domestic from the global context is that, although different
kinds of political entities have different functions domestically (courts, administrative
bodies, military power, etc.), they are characterized by a certain kind of unity, where the
legislature (in democratic states) has a kind of supremacy (though limited by the con-
stitution established by the constituent power) in that it lends legitimacy to the other
entities to carry out democratic functions. In the global domain, however, these differ-
ent kinds of entities are not united but to a large extent dispersed. This diversity and its
implications for standards of political legitimacy are rarely explored in the literature on
global democracy. It may turn out that the best way forward here would be to develop
standards of political legitimacy that utilize the ideal of democracy together with other
normative sources, such that for example international organizations with adminis-
trative and enforcement functions must be mandated by democratic decision-​making
entities to be democratically legitimate (through democratic state consent, a world par-
liament, or the like, depending on which approach we favour) as well as to fulfil criteria
of moral non-​rejectability to be sufficiently just.

Empirical Constraints on the Promotion

of Global Democracy
If we now turn to empirical concerns with regard to constraints on the promotion of
global democracy, additional limitations come to the fore. When we seek to promote
 The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy    419

democracy in the real world, we cannot simply apply the higher-​level principles of an
ideal of global democracy, since there is no blueprint of application. Indeed, it is a sig-
nificant and explicitly stressed property of normative principles that they do not “apply
themselves.” Rather, such application requires judgement, assessment, and possible
trade-​offs against the backdrop of a specific social context in which the action is sup-
posed to take place (Erman and Möller 2013: 28; O’Neill 1996: 78).
With the aim of promoting global democracy in real political situations by approxi-
mating higher-​level principles through context-​sensitive applied principles, the non-​
ideal mode of theorizing has an important role to play (Swift 2008; Valentini 2012a).
When formulating applied principles, the feasibility constraints discussed earlier—​
adopted for theorizing what global democracy is—​will probably turn out to be too
accommodating. To properly respond to the question of what step to take from where
we are now to make the global order more democratic requires contextual knowledge
about (for example) how actual international organizations work and the different func-
tions they play in global governance.
For example, consider those approaches to global democracy that stress the role of
transnational actors’ involvement in global governance for increased global democracy,
such as stakeholder accounts and civil society accounts. We learn from recent empirical
work on the involvement of transnational actors in global governance about the import-
ant role played by democratic states. It is shown that the main explanation why inter-
national organizations open the door for transnational actors is that their members are
democratic states (Tallberg et al. 2013). Hence, also for approaches focusing on non-​state
actors such as social movements and NGOs, an important step towards increased global
democracy under current (non-​ideal) conditions would be to appreciate the essential
role played by democratic states, which they tend to ignore.
With the aim of exploring the ethical limits of global democracy, there is no reason to
think that either ideal or non-​ideal modes of theorizing must have priority. Both modes
have a central place in IPT, and which of them turns out to be most important depends
on the problem at hand and what work the theory is supposed to do. As we have seen
so far, there are many different aspects of the limits of global democracy, and the choice
of mode of theorizing must depend on which aspects are central for the purposes at
hand. For example, it may turn out—​although it cannot be generalized—​that context-​
sensitive principles will be more action-​guiding when it comes to certain kinds of
sought actions. However, even if we may theorize context-​sensitive principles of global
democracy without higher-​level principles at our disposal—​as pointed out by Amartya
Sen, we may choose “more democratic non-​ideal A” over “more democratic non-​ideal
B” here and now without relating them to an ideal of global democracy (2009)5—​we
should not underestimate the significant role that higher-​level principles can play in
this endeavour in some situations. There might be cases in which it turns out that by
choice A we in fact place ourselves not only at a deadlock for moving further towards
increased global democracy but at a severe danger of worsening things. Consider,
for example, decisions about nuclear power or about climate change that we make
today and their consequences for future generations. In such cases, it seems reason-
able to presume that we would like to know whether a step in a seemingly (short-​term)
420   Eva Erman

better direction would make an ideal or higher-​level principle unattainable (Erman and
Möller 2013: 31–​2).
Whilst both ideal and non-​ideal modes of theorizing have important roles to play in
IPT, they should not be conflated. Unfortunately, the debate on global democracy has
not demonstrated the same awareness of the differences between these modes of theor-
izing as the justice debate. Looking closer at some of the more influential proposals for
democratic global governance, it is hard to discern under what feasibility constraints
they are formulated and how these constraints are justified. Take, for example, cosmo-
politan accounts of global democracy. While political cosmopolitans are in agreement
that a democratized inter-​state system is not equipped to deal with today’s global-​sized
problems, most of them resist a (federal) world state or democratic world government
(Held 1995; Archibugi 2004; 2008). It is insisted that the cosmopolitan model should
not be regarded as a form of global government, and institutional suggestions instead
emphasize a global domestic politics without world government (Habermas 2006), in
which conditions of political autonomy are established on different levels of governance
in a functional and non-​hierarchical manner (Archibugi 2004: 446).
However, whereas a democratic world state is claimed to be both unfeasible and
undesirable, the grounds for these rejections are never spelled out and defended
(Scheuerman 2014; Ulas 2016). This, I believe, can partly be explained by a vagueness
with regard to the nature of the normative argument pursued and hence a blurring of
the two modes of theorizing. If it is not clear which mode of theorizing is intended, and
for what purpose, we have no way of knowing on what grounds we may validate or reject
the conclusions. It would, for example, be a high theoretical and normative price to pay
for political cosmopolitanism if it turned out that their vision of a dispersed system of
democratic governance would be as difficult to approximate under current conditions
as some form of democratic world state with centralized authority functions.
From the view proposed here, since feasibility constraints are a matter of degree there
is a continuum between ideal and non-​ideal theorizing. Moreover, an account may con-
sist of principles construed under different feasibility constraints (cf. Rawls 1971), where
some of the principles are more ideal than others. Thus, we may perfectly well use one
set of feasibility constraints for justifying principles of democracy which respond to the
question of what global democracy is, and another set of feasibility constraints for the-
orizing applied principles for here and now, which respond to the question of what we
should do in the current situation if we wish to approximate this ideal. The important
thing is that the principles fit together, such that the more applied principles are reason-
able also from the standpoint of the more ideal principles given the presumed feasibility
constraints. If they do not fit, one of them would have to be abandoned or at least be
revised.
This view opens up interesting possibilities for the debate on global democracy, as it
may turn out that approaches depicted as competing accounts of global democracy in
fact are compatible (perhaps with some amendments). To return to the example above,
given the empirical support for the important role that democratic states play for includ-
ing civil society actors in international organizations, it looks as if approaches focusing
 The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy    421

on stakeholders and civil society actors (Dryzek 2006; Scholte 2014)—​which are usually
very sceptical of statist views—​may move further towards realizing their basic principles
of democracy through an intergovernmentalist approach that stresses the importance of
democratizing states rather than other political entities. To explore such possibilities of
compatibility, however, theorists in this debate need to become more much upfront
about which feasibility constraints their accounts are theorized under and what the jus-
tifications for them are.

The Limits of Global Democracy

and Moral Concerns

When thinking about practical normativity in relation to how best to organize our glo-
bal political world, normative theorists with a political science background tend to see
democracy as the main normative yardstick. But we are also committed to other higher-​
level principles, such as distributive justice, gender equality, and non-​domination,
which may generate moral reasons to put restrictions on democracy in the global
domain.

Moral Constraints on the Construal of Global Democracy

A democratic polity is commonly constrained and enabled by a constitution in the form
of a set of fundamental principles, procedures, and precedents setting out standards for
how the polity is to be organized and governed. Similarly, in a global governance con-
text, a treaty that establishes an international organization may be described as a con-
stitution in the sense that it defines how the entity is constituted. In well-​functioning
democratic states, constitutional essentials and the rule of law make up the normative
boundary conditions for democratic decision-​making. Among other things, the rule of
law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including the law-​makers themselves,
and one important function of the constitutional framework is to delimit political power
by establishing lines that rulers cannot cross through the enforcement of fundamental
rights. For theoretical purposes, however, it is useful to distinguish the ideal of democ-
racy, “the rule by the people,” from the ideal of justice, since these fundamental rights are
not only intended to protect citizens as democratic agents, but also fulfil a principle of
equal respect for persons.
Principles of justice are usually said to respond to the question of “who owes what to
whom,” where entitlements are commonly expressed in terms of a set of rights (Valentini
2012b: 595). On contemporary liberal accounts of justice, institutions are just inasmuch
as they secure basic rights and realize a fair distribution of burdens and benefits among
citizens (Rawls 1971; Dworkin 2000). In contrast to justice, democracy consists of a
422   Eva Erman

two-​way relation rather than a one-​way relation: it is not foremost about the distribution
of entitlements and rights and about subjects being the recipients of goods, but about
the justifiability of political relations. Since democracy is concerned with regulating the
relationship between entities exercising political power and those over whom it is exer-
cised, it is something that must be achieved—​rather than received—​through justifiable
procedures (Erman 2013). Although fundamental rights put substantial side-​constraints
on democratic decision-​making, it is the procedural property that gives democratic
legitimacy its content-​independent character—​i.e. gives those to whom the decisions
apply content-​independent reasons to comply or not interfere with the functioning of
the political entity making these decisions, regardless of their positive or negative view
of the contents of such decisions (Buchanan and Keohane 2006; Erman 2016).
Utilizing this distinction, we may argue that justice both enables and limits democ-
racy. An important question in view of the present purposes is what the equivalent of the
constitutional essentials would be in global governance. This is too little explored in the
theoretical literature on global democracy. Indeed, human rights are the most discussed
candidate for an embryonic constitutional skeleton. But even though everyone agrees
that human rights are important for the democratization of global politics, what should
be explored in much more detail is what role human rights should play in a theory of
global democracy.
Importantly, though, in specifying the role of human rights in global democracy, we
should be careful not to construe global democracy in terms of human rights, such as in
the form of a minimal threshold for democratic legitimacy in global decision-​making
(Goodhart 2008; Bohman 2007), in which democracy is seen as a “political commit-
ment to realizing freedom and equality for everyone through the protection of human
rights” (Bohman 2007: 416). For even if human rights are likely to be a necessary condi-
tion of global democracy on any reasonable account, they are not sufficient. We can have
perfectly enforced human rights globally, without any joint political decision-​making
whatsoever at any level. Human rights are individual, and as such they may success-
fully protect important aspects of moral equality and moral agency (see Chapter 22).
Democracy, however, is an ideal of collective self-​rule premised on political equality,
in which those affected by or subjected to the rules have an equal say in the decision-​
making about them. And political equality has to do with a particular kind of agency,
namely, democratic agency.

Moral Constraints on the Promotion

of Global Democracy
A final question brought up for discussion here concerns when global democracy is
even desirable and worth promoting. The way global democracy has been approached
here—​as applicable to law-​and policy-​making rather than all forms of power projec-
tion in the global public domain—​it is a political ideal with a relatively narrow scope.
Due to its narrow scope, there may be cases where it is rightfully trumped by ideals with
 The Ethical Limits of Global Democracy    423

more comprehensive scope, such as global justice. From this standpoint, a plausible
response to the question of when global democracy is worth promoting would be the
following: if and only if doing so does not involve moral costs that are too extreme (see
Buchanan 2004).
There will of course be different answers to the question of what threshold of moral
cost could reasonably be justified, which a substantial account of global democ-
racy would have to formulate. While there is likely to be overlap between accounts on
some minimal level of distributive justice and moral equality, formulating and justify-
ing a moral threshold for global democracy is a complex matter. For even if political
equality—​the principle that people affected by or subjected to rules should have an equal
say in their making—​is the cornerstone of democracy, it is not immediately translat-
able from moral equality or equipped to protect all aspects of moral equality. Although
these developments often go hand in hand, it is not self-​evident that promoting glo-
bal democracy will always be the best way forward for globally reducing severe poverty
(see Chapter 27) or injustices. Here again, both ideal and non-​ideal modes of theorizing
become important, since we would want to know to what extent reducing global injust-
ices through non-​democratic means on a short-​term basis will lead us into a difficult
position for realizing global democracy on a long-​term basis.
Another set of concerns is raised by the so-​called problem of the second best. This
problem is not a criticism of ideal theory, as argued by some non-​ideal theorists (Farrelly
2007: 845, 853), but concerns the inevitable problem of trade-​offs if we attempt to real-
ize several competing or conflicting desirable conditions simultaneously. Let us assume
that we have three ideal conditions—​say, global democracy, distributive justice, and
world peace—​that we wish to realize but which, taken together, are unrealizable. We
might think that under such non-​ideal circumstances, the second best option would be
to realize these conditions as much as possible. However, as noted by Robert Goodin,
what the general theory of second best teaches us is that such intuitions are in error. The
second best state of affairs might not be a situation in which we implement more of our
ideal conditions rather than fewer, or implement each of them to a greater rather than
lesser degree. For example, to realize all three to some degree might be preferable to
realizing all but one of them completely. Indeed, not even such a refined trade-​off cap-
tures the complexity involved when attempting to realize several ideal conditions at the
same time. Once we take into account the interdependencies between global democ-
racy, distributive justice, and world peace, it might turn out to be the case that less rather
than more of any of the ideally desirable goods is a better option under second best cir-
cumstances (Goodin 1995: 54).
The implications of the “second best” problem have not been sufficiently appreci-
ated in global democracy literature. Instead, there is a tendency among political theor-
ists to rely on what I have called an “additive” premise, according to which democracy
is understood in terms of a number of separate “democratic” values—​most noticeably,
transparency, accountability, deliberation, and participation—​and it is presumed that
the more one or more of these values are strengthened in the operation of rules, pro-
cedures, and mechanisms, the more democratic global governance institutions become
424   Eva Erman

(Scholte 2014; Steffek et al. 2008; Dryzek 2011). This picture, however, is misleading,
since we may strengthen all of these values without any increase in global democracy.
In order to know whether more transparency, accountability, deliberation, and partici-
pation lead to more democracy, we have to look at how they relate to political equality
(Erman 2013: 863).

Conclusion

The complex and multifaceted question of the ethical limits of global democracy is tre-
mendously difficult to address in a single chapter. Rather than developing a substan-
tive account, my aim in the current chapter has been to discuss number of desiderata
in terms of fundamental empirical and normative concerns that any successful account
would have to address. As I have tried to show, the conditions under which global dem-
ocracy should be construed and promoted depend on a variety of factors, such as what
theory of global democracy we favour, on what political entities the ideal of democracy
is supposed to be applied, what feasibility constraints we adopt, and what other norma-
tive ideals we are committed to in regulating global affairs.

Notes
1. For the present purposes, I will use the terms “ethical,” “moral,” and “normative”
interchangeably.
2. I interpret these feasibility requirements in terms of a negative epistemological proposition
such that the ideal must not be proven incompatible with the basic features of human nature
as we know it and not be proven unachievable from the status quo.
3. For an analysis of ideal theory, see Valentini (Chapter 50) in this volume.
4. As I use the term here, a normative ideal may be described as a set of higher-​level principles.
5. Hence, we would not “dive blind” without an ideal at our disposal, as John Simmons claims
(Simmons 2010: 34).

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 ­c hapter 32

The C ontested Et h i c s of
De mo cracy Promot i on

Milja Kurki

This chapter examines the ethical justifications as to why we might wish to engage in the
promotion of democracy in other countries today. Specifically, the aim is to engage in
reflection on the ethics of international democracy promotion in the context of recent
debates over the contested nature of democracy as a concept.
This angle of investigation is interesting for at least two reasons. First, despite the
confidence of many democracy promoters in acting in democracy’s defence globally,
it is not self-​evident what is ethically good about democracy and whether and why it
should be promoted. Even within the currently dominant liberal frames of democracy,
there are many unresolved questions about the nature, purpose, and legitimacy of the
policy of promoting democracy. We will also observe that if we pay close attention to
alternative, non-​(or rather “extra-​”) liberal democratic traditions, even more trouble-
some questions over ethics of democracy promotion arise, for with contested notions of
democracy come also contested ethical frames as to how we should evaluate, judge, and
practise democracy promotion.
Despite the interesting and tricky nature of “ethics” in democracy promotion, eth-
ical questions are often sidelined in democracy promotion policy practice today. This
is arguably due to the embeddedness in this policy agenda of certain kinds of ethical
and conceptual frames that are more often than not liberal or neoliberal. These frames
remain implicit because they operate within an increasingly “technical” or “depoliti-
cized” democracy promotion discourse.
We must therefore start by examining current policy practice, to understand how
democracy promotion is conceived of today, and why and how ethical debate fits (or
does not fit) within it. The first section will introduce democracy promotion, or “dem-
ocracy support” as it is currently known, and will address three aspects of current pol-
icy practice: (1) the increasing depoliticization of democracy promotion; (2) the often
implicit “liberal consensus” on democracy in its promotion; and (3) the shifts towards
“local ownership” in the policy agenda. While each trend can be seen as a response to
428   Milja Kurki

the critics of “classical” democracy promotion, we also see that ethical questions fit with
considerable difficulty into current policy practices.
In the second part we consider the ethics of democracy support explicitly and in the
context of debates around its contested nature. I discuss first the dominant liberal eth-
ical frame and questions it raises. I then discuss a number of alternative conceptual and
ethical frames we might consider. How do social democrats, radical democrats, global
democrats, and “post-​humanist” democrats, for example, consider democracy and the
ethics of its promotion? The chapter seeks to argue that, while ethical questions around
democracy support are much more complex and contested than normally recognized,
addressing them can also help this policy agenda.

Technical, Implicitly Liberal, Locally

Owned Democracy Support, and
the Problem of Ethics

Although for many philosophers and political theorists, democracy has been a key site
of “ethical” debate as to what counts as the good life and how we should treat each other,
ethical debate is, paradoxically, not a dominant focus in democracy support today.
Rather, the practice of democracy promotion today treats both democracy and its pro-
motion as by and large “technical” agendas. To understand why, a short survey of current
policy practice around democracy support is required. I start with a short description of
the policy and its evolution and then focus on three core aspects of current practice: its
depoliticization, its implicit liberalism, and its commitment to local ownership.
Democracy promotion is a wide-​ranging policy agenda with a long history. It has
its origins in the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century anti-​imperialist foreign policy
of the newly formed United States of America, in the twentieth-​century liberal inter-
nationalism of Woodrow Wilson, in the postwar reconstruction efforts in Japan and
Germany, and in the “development aid” instruments conceived of in the 1960s (for an
excellent history, see Smith 1994). However, the 1980s and especially the 1990s, were
the so-​called golden age of democracy promotion. At this time, at the end of the Cold
War, not only did many regions of the world ask for assistance in reforming their gov-
ernance structure, but liberal Western states also found a new confidence (driven no
doubt by power considerations) to step into the breach to provide such assistance (see
Chapter 37).
In the 1990s the core of the policy revolved around legal and institutional reform,
electoral assistance, and some civil society support. The so-​called sequencing debate
suggested that once certain steps had been taken in democratizing a country, other steps
to consolidate could follow. The policy practices then focused on lining up the steps
in the path to democratization. Much has been learned about democratization since,
and in response various adjustments have also taken place in democracy promotion.
 Contested Ethics of Democracy Promotion    429

Today it is no longer an agenda driven by “linear” sequencing models, and its policy
instruments are very varied. Today, democracy promotion is a multifaceted and multi-​
pronged policy agenda. While transforming legal structures and political institutions,
various levels and types of pressure can be asserted and in various spheres of activity:
from the political systems to service provision, economic policy, trade policy, and civil
society constitution.
A huge range of tools are now used: from démarches and statements to sanctions
and penalties, from funding of electoral monitoring and parliamentary support to
institution-​building and budget support to ministries, from trade conditionalities to
international organization membership conditionalities (such as EU enlargement),
from civil society project-​funding for specific political forces to technical assistance and
spread of “best governance” practices. Crucially, today, in any specific country a spe-
cific mix of methods, carefully assessed and fitted into context, are deployed. There is
no single blueprint but a varied set of assessments and responses to the needs of specific
societies. The choice of methods to be deployed relies of course on judgements on what
might best work in given contexts but also, importantly, on power-​political judgements
(see Chapter 43). Indeed, it is important to remember that democracy support is always
conducted in the context of considerations of power—​even if these are not necessarily
the only considerations that are relevant in democracy support, as some realists would
argue (for further discussion, see Bridoux and Kurki 2014: ch. 3).
How might we characterize the trends in this multi-​pronged policy practice today?
Three key observations (developed in more detail elsewhere; see especially Kurki
2013) are appropriate in regard to the current policy agenda before we can move on to
the ethical implications.
First, democracy today is treated as a factual “thing,” and democracy promotion is
about the transposition of these technically efficient ways of governing to others glo-
bally. As such, crucially, democracy and its promotion now seem to have nothing
self-​evidently to do with “ethical” debate about values, what ought to be, or normative
questions as to how we should treat each other. Ethical and value-​laden statements were
in the 1990s characteristic of democracy promotion, but policy practices, however var-
ied, tend to assume that democracy is a standard of modern statehood, and that as a
result it is self-​evident that democracy should be encouraged (see e.g. European Council
2015; US State Department 2017). This is the case partly because “factually” democracy
has been observed to create more stability and harmony in international affairs, but also
because ethically it is assumed that democracy “is a good thing.”
This factuality of democracy is manifested in the increasingly scientific, instrumental
mechanisms for measurement and management of democracy projects. The applicants
for civil society funding, for example, today have to navigate a range of management
measures through which they can come to identify and then to track the causal effects
of their actions. There is a “factish” reality to democracy support today (Kurki 2017), one
which requires ethical and contested political debate around democracy and democracy
promotion to be sidestepped in favour of a focus on measuring democracy and creating
“accountability” between donors and recipients of aid (see Chapter 34).
430   Milja Kurki

Second, at the same time as depoliticizing debate on democracy, there is a tendency

for democracy promotion today to be implicitly liberal, or neoliberal, in its foundational
assumptions. The democracy sought is a liberal democracy, and the context within
which it is to operate is liberal, including economically and in terms of the international
organizational arrangements surrounding it. Democracy support is about maintenance
of liberal order both within and outside states. What this means is that the fact that dem-
ocracy promotion or support appears “technical” does not mean it is devoid of value
systems or political biases. Indeed, it is the “implicit” liberalism, and the fact that it is
widely accepted that allows the practice to appear as “neutral.”
The implicit liberalism embedded in democracy support is in part surprising, for (as
has been noted) there have been attempts to adjust policy practices in the field which
were once, in the 1990s, firmly and openly liberal. Since the 1990s there have been turns
“away from sequencing,” “back to the state,” and opening to “plurality of experiences
on democracy.” However, even as this is the case, it appears that at the core of the exist-
ing policy practice is simultaneously a deep liberal bias. Recognition of debate, variety,
pluralism, or stability of the state are today important, but still within a broadly liberal
understanding of the state and the international order.
There is a third trend of importance since the mid-​2000s. This is the turn to “local
ownership.” This turn is important for a number of reasons. First, it shows signs of rec-
ognition of the problems that “top-​down” democracy promotion has faced in the past.
Second, it is practically significant in having pushed democracy support increasingly
towards the civil society and project-​funding instruments. Third, it has also been import-
ant because, while local ownership is deemed important, it is deemed implementable
within a depoliticized and implicitly liberal democracy support project (Abrahamsen
2004; Kurki 2011). Whether these three things really are a coherent mix is a question vex-
ing both academics and policy practitioners today: how locally owned can a project be if
it is to sit within particular technical, and implicitly liberal, management frames?
The current policy paradigm and practice of democracy support is, as we have seen,
multi-​faceted, varied in responses, and open to learning. Yet the three trends, taken indi-
vidually as well as in how they manifest together, are far from unproblematic. Indeed,
they give rise to certain practical problems in democracy support today—​for example,
around meaningfulness of local ownership, around how to deal with plurality of views
on democracy in target countries, and around how to “entice” target groups to work
with the “technical” instruments.
Yet, given our concerns, one could suggest that the current policy trends are ultim-
ately problematic because they work to hide an implicit set of ethical commitments.
While it is good to seek best practice, fine-​tune delivery instruments, and measure the
effects of democracy support aid, what the current technical approach to democracy
support sidesteps is that at its heart both democracy and democracy support are per-
haps far from “technical” but instead intensely political and ethical notions and prac-
tices. The fact that the ethics of democracy or democracy promotion are not currently
addressed but sidestepped in policy documents, practices, and practitioner debates is
therefore problematic: no matter how perfect our “science” of democracy promotion
 Contested Ethics of Democracy Promotion    431

and democratization, we also need to recognize the inevitable politics (power relations)
and inevitable ethics (value judgements on good life) involved with all engagements
with democracy and democracy promotion. We need to carefully draw out, excavate
if you like, the ethics in democracy promotion. As we shall see, this task is potentially
more tricky than we tend to believe.

Excavating the Ethics of Democracy

Promotion

In seeking to gain a sense of the ethics of democracy promotion and how we might think
about it, I start by exploring liberal ethics for the practice, moving on to interrogate the
implications of more challenging “extra-​liberal” ethical frameworks.

Varied Liberal Ethics and Democracy Promotion

There is no doubt that liberalism provides the core ground for thinking about democ-
racy in the domestic contexts of most, certainly Western, states and also of democracy
promotion as a legitimate policy in international politics. Liberalism has a complex and
intriguing history; we will not delve into it here, but it is worth noting that as an ideo-
logical frame it is inextricably tied to a particular social context: the rise of entrepre-
neurial, republican classes sceptical of authoritarian monarchical rule. Combined with
arguments for free trade, the liberals developed notions of representative governance
and rule of law which would ensure their representation within the state and, crucially,
the stability of their investments against any exercise of arbitrary monarchical will (see
e.g. McPherson 1977 for the history of liberal democracy). What made the proposals
for representative government “democratic” was the incremental inclusion of other
interests and classes into the idea of representative government. This was a hard-​earned
opening up towards liberal democracy (see e.g. Bowles and Gintis 1987; Rueschemeyer
1992), but an important one, as the idea of liberal democracy by the 1920s was rather dis-
tinct from the elite model of representative government imagined by the early liberals.
This liberal representative “democracy,” as it was (eventually) accepted, became char-
acterized by a universal or nearly universal suffrage, individuals’ representation through
representatives chosen in elections, checks and balances between executive and parlia-
ment, an independent judiciary, and respect for the equality of citizens’ rights. An open
civil society within which freedom of religion and speech were reinforced was to pro-
vide a check on representatives and the state to allow for the independent development
of the spirit of entrepreneurship.
While premised on the interest of various classes and also some hard-​fought social
struggles (by feminists and working classes, for example), the liberal democratic state
432   Milja Kurki

also emerged as an “ethical” frame within which understandings of moral imperatives

of the “good life” were understood. It is these liberal “ethical values” that are considered
to be at the heart of democratic thought, practice, and systems today. These values con-
sist of: respect for the autonomy of each reasoning human individual; respect for their
right to express their interests and views; representation of their interests and needs in a
political system; pluralism of an open society and political system; and maintenance of
equality between individuals in politics and also in economic affairs (normally by allow-
ing individual entrepreneurship to be exercised).
These values have of course also been contested by liberals. Indeed, liberalism and lib-
eral democratic thought is not a singular tradition of thought or practice. An important
set of orientations, pushing in somewhat different directions from “classical” liberalism,
emerged early on within liberal thought. While classical liberals emphasized negative
freedoms, autonomy of the individual, and the separation of powers as well as separ-
ation of spheres of the economic and the political, the “social liberal” or “reform lib-
eral” tradition emphasized that core liberal values—​equality and autonomy—​could not
be maintained within a condition of “negative freedom,” but required the active inter-
vention of the state to provide for the “equality of opportunity” between individuals.
Social liberals argued for active intervention of the state in the economy to ensure that
unacceptable inequalities would not arise, and maintained that active encouragement of
expression of views by working classes and women, for example, was needed to ensure
they were fully represented within government (Hobson 1909; see also Freeden 1998).
Although liberalism comes in various permutations, at its core lies, arguably, an ethic
of respect for liberal individual autonomy within a limited and rational system of gov-
ernance, which ensures openness of representation, view formation, and expression. But
how does a liberal ethic express itself in relation to the idea of “promoting democracy”?
I have argued above that there is an implicit liberalism present in democracy support.
But what we can see is that there is in fact no singular ethics, even within liberal debate,
even as there are certain delimiting parameters to such debate.
Historically, there have been important disagreements at the heart of a liberal demo-
cratic tradition on ethics of democracy promotion. This was evident in the views of
the early American fathers of the first truly liberal democratic public. While Thomas
Jefferson, for example, wanted to aggressively make the “ball of liberty” roll over the
globe with American assistance, John Quincy Adams was more reluctant. For him,
the US should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” but rather should lead
the world only by example (for a discussion, see e.g. Bridoux and Kurki 2014: 4). This
debate between liberals with different orientations to promotion of democracy is still
reflected in today’s debates on democracy promotion. Indeed, when it comes to Syria,
Ukraine, China, and the Middle East, policy debates revolve around the question of
where we should draw the balance between the urge to promote democracy “every-
where” and “anytime” and the need to show respect for the autonomy of others to come
to democratic principles on their own.
The more “aggressive” liberal frame, visible today in calls for support to democracy
activists in China and Russia, arises from a classical liberal notion which locates the
 Contested Ethics of Democracy Promotion    433

ethical drive to promote liberal democracy in the universal moral law that rights of indi-
viduals and of democratic representation apply to all individual humans on this planet.
If all individuals have rights, the sovereignty of states can stand in the way of the realiza-
tion of the ethical good for all (even though, of course, paradoxically it is the “state” that
democratizers want to democratize in defence of rights of individuals). In principle, if
all people on earth have a right to democratic governance, out of respect for their auton-
omy, then this should be promoted by ethically thinking, consistently practising liberals
everywhere: Ukraine, Syria, China, and not just the “easy” countries where democracy
is called for.
Nevertheless, others argue that the liberal ethics of democracy support cannot be so
“easy.” Indeed, a substantial tradition within liberalism, especially but not always tied up
with the social liberal tradition, argues that the active promotion of democracy in other
societies is not ethically praiseworthy. Respect for the democratic value of autonomy
for them is central. We must then think carefully about democracy links to sovereignty
in international politics, and this entails, they argue, the need to consider the rights of
states and societies to determine their own system of governance. Aggressive promotion
of liberal democracy is considered anti-​democratic in spirit: instead, good role models
need to be set up in the democratic countries for others to follow willingly. Insofar as
liberals should do anything, perhaps they could, as many “democracy supporters” today
argue, assist in non-​interfering ways to fund “locally owned” democracy projects (even
though many critics contest just how non-​interfering this mode of intervention is).
Given the range of possible liberal positions on the ethics of democracy promotion, it
is no surprise that in practice there are still debates on whether, when, and how democ-
racy promotion should be engaged in between liberals of many hues. In the American
scene, for example, the tensions between proactive and less active as well as between
liberal and reform liberal traditions are still being played out (see Kurki 2013; Bridoux
and Kurki 2014). At the same time, to maintain an appearance of unity, most policy act-
ors also try to smooth over the cracks in how they relate to values of democracy and
democracy promotion. Indeed, it is precisely in the context of the persistence of liberal
ethical debate in both the US and the EU that the tendency to try and “depoliticize”
debates on liberal democracy and its promotion emerge: to try to show a consensual face
to the funders of activity and to the increasingly sceptical domestic and international
audiences.
The attempts to smooth over the ethical debates on democracy promotion among dif-
ferent liberal democratic traditions presents some problems—​not least in giving rise to
self-​contradictory tendencies in democracy promotion between those hoping to defend
it on “ethical” or “value” grounds and those seeking to “de-​ethicize” (and depoliticize)
it, often for the sake of greater consensus on funding at home and greater acceptance
abroad. Many recipients of democracy aid—​and even some donors—​today are, rightly,
confused about what this agenda exactly stands for in terms of values and why.
Yet these challenges are minor when set against the much more significant challenge
for this policy agenda today, which is the rise of alternative ways of thinking of both
democracy and the ethics of democracy promotion. These alternative approaches pose
434   Milja Kurki

a challenge to the liberal orientation of both democracy and its global promotion. The
following section examines four such traditions.

Alternative Models and their Ethics

The history of democracy is not just the history of liberal democracy. Democracy is a
concept that has been at the centre of many different political ideologies and many dif-
ferent political struggles. This is partly why it is one of the first and foremost “contested
concepts” in politics (Gallie 1956). Contestation over democracy arises from different
appropriations of the concept, placing it in different conceptual universes in the context
of different social struggles. For some, democracy is associated with rights, freedoms,
elections; for others, with socioeconomic justice, participation, and equality. The differ-
ent conceptual universes of democracy are of significance because they create different
ethical frameworks within which the concept has been understood and practised: what
democracy is for, what it entails for the good life, and why it should be adopted.
Here I briefly discuss four different traditions of democratic thought and how they
relate to the question of ethics of democracy promotion: social democracy, radical dem-
ocracy, global democracy, and post-​human democracy.
Social democracy has its roots in a Marxist or socialist critique (see Chapter 49) of the
failings of liberal democracy. Much like social liberals, social democrats argue that to
achieve “democracy,” a reframing of how democracy should function but also a refram-
ing of its core values is necessary. Social democrats are concerned about placing dem-
ocracy in the context of equality. For them, however, equality is a socioeconomic, not
simply a legal, concept. It entails actual socioeconomic as well as political equality of
individuals in terms of their rights and representation but also employment and social
function. Democracy conceived legally or in terms of political rights is considered
“empty”: for democracy to have ethical value in the context of our societies in which
power relations structure economic and social relations and not just political relations,
a wider conception of democracy is needed. A democratic system requires a “dual”
core: equality of rights and representation in the political sphere, but combined with
equality of representation and rights in the economic and employment spheres. A dif-
ferent kind of a democratic state from the liberal democratic state is demanded: one
with substantial state intervention, and crucially one with representation of citizens in
the sphere of employment law and redistribution, and indeed in the market in the form
of co-​ownership structures (Tilton 1990; Berman 2006).
The ethics of promoting this kind of democracy globally are rather more complex too.
While many social democrats believe in the superiority of the social democratic state,
and while many party-​political actors in Nordic countries have promoted this model
in developing countries, and indeed in the West, there is a less, or a different kind, of
a universalist drive for democratization present in social democratic tradition. Social
democrats tend to want to facilitate democracy elsewhere, but focus not simply on the
political system but also on issues of economic equality and labour. At the same time,
 Contested Ethics of Democracy Promotion    435

an ethical critique of liberal universalism also arises from social democracy. The prin-
ciple of state sovereignty has an important meaning to social democrats: it allows the
state to determine its own affairs in defence of its people’s democracy. If sovereignty is
a democratic value for these deeply communitarian social democrats, then a breach of
sovereign rights in defence of universal rights is frowned upon. This is why social demo-
crats can be both democracy-​promoting in their ethics and at the same time sceptical
of a universalist facilitation of liberal political systems and rights: these can lead to false
universalisms which ignore the socioecononomic context and indeed content of dem-
ocracy as conceived of by social democrats.
Radical democracy draws inspiration from the participatory democratic movements
that have since the 1960s proliferated in many (primarily) liberal or social democratic
states. These movements sought to pluralize the “spheres” of democratic governance in
modern states—​bringing democratic principles to everyday practices, such as school
boards and civic life. Developed originally by the likes of Benjamin Barber (2004) and
Carole Pateman (1970), participatory democracy has recently evolved in the writings by
Laclau and Mouffe (2001) on radical democracy. Radical democrats argue that democ-
racy is not about liberal rights, universal values, or consensus-​building amongst liberal
subjects within a rational state. Instead, it is about conflict, about contestation, about a
radical pluralism of views not to be “owned” or controlled by a specific ideological trad-
ition. Drawing its inspiration from the rise of new social movements both within and
between states, radical democracy does not seek institutionalization, nor does it draw
boundaries between states. Rather, it calls for an ethos of agonism, an ethos of contest-
ation and pluralism, in a global setting.
Movements within states but also transnational fora like the World Social Forum, it
is suggested, are associated with the workings of radical democratic principles. Here,
democracy is a practice of dialogue, contestation, and everyday working out of views
amongst diverse groups, without absolute procedural guidance, proceedings, or func-
tions. Democracy is radical democracy: open, fluid, contested, multiple.
The international ethics of this way of thinking about democracy are also quite dif-
ferent. There is no drive to universalize democracy, to promote specific models of dem-
ocracy. Indeed, on this view there is no need to “promote” democracy: it emerges and
contests from the ground up where it exists. Democracy is not a blueprint, a model,
something which can be controlled, packaged, sold, or promoted. It “is” the ethos of
pluralism. Democracy promotion here then is not (indeed cannot be) about the promo-
tion of a singular model or a practice with a universal moral law behind it. Nor is it about
more contextual promotion on the lines of social democrats. Instead, one could say that
what is advanced here is an ethical critique of the restriction, or disciplining, of dem-
ocracy through democracy support which seeks to specify what democracy is. Radical
democrats call for the opening up and radicalizing of the pluralistic ethos of speaking
and practising democracy globally—​in the West and the rest—​and in this, “democracy
promoters” should have no superior moral role.
Global democracy too comes with challenges to liberal democratic frames. Although
it has various forms, ranging from liberal and social democratic globalism to global
436   Milja Kurki

deliberative democracy, global democrats are agreed upon the notion that if democ-
racy is to have ethical or practical purchase today it needs to be imagined, not within
a state-​bound ethic, but rather a more cosmopolitan ethic (see Chapter 3). Not only is
“state-​based” democracy less meaningful in the context of globalization but, crucially,
individuals globally do not gain proper representation on matters involving “external-
ities” decided on in other states. This means that a cosmopolitan global identity and glo-
bal democratic institutions are needed to develop a form of democracy that can live up
to its promise as a concept.
There is a democracy-​promoting drive in this framework: many cosmopolitan or
global democrats are indeed at the heart of political struggles to create better, more
democratic global institutions, setting forward “covenants” on the basis of which such
institutions could be engendered (Held 2004). Promoting democracy is also a global
aim. Yet their orientation to classical liberal notions of democracy promotion is some-
what sceptical. These authors argue that we need to think through economics and social
policy as well as the “political” sphere in order for democratization to take place.
This entails a wide-​ranging critique of sovereign and national self-​determination as
an ethical good as well as a challenge to the universality of a liberal democratic “indi-
vidual.” The individual to be protected and enabled in global democracy is closer to a
global social democratic citizen, and (liberal) democracy promotion is challenged at a
fundamental level: it is the (paradoxical) restriction of democracy to the state which
makes democracy promotion today not only practically but also morally questionable.
Democracy is a cosmopolitan, not sovereign, moral good, and thus should not be pro-
moted in such restricted state-​bound frameworks.
Many challenges, conceptually and ethically, arise from these kinds of alternative
models of democracy. If these approaches are challenging, let us discuss another, per-
haps most challenging to current policy discussions of democracy but one which has
a great deal of purchase not only for social theorists but also many social movement
activists today. This is what one might call a post-​human democracy. Authors such as
Donna Harraway (2003) and Bruno Latour (2004), prefigured by Mathews (1995), have
been involved in exploration of the meaning of representation and democracy in the
context of the non-​human. Do animals, plants, and other even “non-​living” (by our
standards) creatures or processes have a right of representation? These “others” so far
excluded from democracy could, they argue, be represented either directly or indirectly
in decision-​making, benefiting from the legal fictions we call rights in equal measure to
our more standard “human” bearers of rights.
Within this frame we get perhaps the most wide-​ranging critique of both the ethics
of liberal democracy and democracy support. Democracy promotion as currently con-
ceived is not just a liberal project benefiting some and ignoring others; it is also a human
project, aimed at protecting and safeguarding the humans on this planet possibly at the
expense of the “others” that facilitate our human life. This is not only ethically question-
able for post-​humanists, it is also far removed from realities of life on this planet, where
symbiotic and complex ecosystems maintain life, both human and non-​human.
 Contested Ethics of Democracy Promotion    437

Within this framework we are forced to expose ideological biases of a deep kind in
our own conceptions of democracy. First, against the hubris of universal rights, we are
forced to accept that in reality humans on this planet are humans very unequally; and
we are also forced to accept that our non-​human species mates also suffer and struggle
to survive, like many of our human “equals” (Braidotti 2013). The issues of representing
these populations, these populations “we” are parasitic on, is an intensely ethical and
politically important challenge. Yet it is a challenge that is hardly addressed or contem-
plated in the universe of liberal assumptions.
Whatever the complications with liberal ethics of democracy promotion, these com-
plications abound when we consider non-​and extra-​liberal understandings of democ-
racy. What does this mean for democracy promotion today?

Conclusion:
Promotion of Democracy Revisited

Let me offer three conclusions as to what the discussion above might mean. First, dem-
ocracy we see here is not a “thing” with an agreed definition. It does not have one mean-
ing, reality, or end state. It is in perpetual process, crisis, negotiation (see also O’Donnell
2007). It is contested. This means that the ethics of democracy promotion are also neces-
sarily far more tricky than implied by the current policy frameworks. As implied by the
brief survey of the different approaches to democracy and democracy promotion, the
ethics of democracy and democracy promotion are very much up for contestation and
struggle today. In these struggles, those with funds and discursive hegemony tend to
win out; but this does not mean that their definitions of democracy or the ethics of its
promotion are or will be universally accepted or reproduced globally. We should not
expect this or assume it, but discuss it.
This might, secondly, assist in obtaining more meaningful dialogue around dem-
ocracy and challenges to it, domestically and internationally, and might offer greater
“leverage” (as practitioners would put it) on the ground. We need to reflect on the mul-
tiple manifestations of democratic thought and practice, and think seriously about what
this means for democracy promotion.
In so doing we need, thirdly, to be wary of what it is that democracy and democracy
promotion “do.” This is because it is possible that democracy and democracy promo-
tion do not do what we think they do: promote democracy. Democracy promotion also
promotes particular ways of life, for example, liberal entrepreneurial life, consumerist
capitalist life, life controlled by “states.” Not only that—​if post-​humanists are right, it
also promotes “humans” as unique, separable reference points of morality, or ethics.
Promoting democracy does much more than have an effect on “democracy”: it also jus-
tifies and facilitates ways of life, discourses, power relations between humans, and also,
perhaps, power relations to non-​humans.
438   Milja Kurki

From this perspective, while I will not here call for any one ethical frame (this would
be difficult given the trickiness we have encountered), I will call for what surveying mul-
tiple frames seems to entail: that we remain more circumspect about all ethical frames,
including our “own.” We cannot live without ethics, but perhaps we need to think more
carefully just how we debate our ethics and those of others. Indeed, with reflection on
the many alternative ethical frames concerning democracy and its promotion, perhaps
we will become just a little more circumspect about: first, those ethical arguments which
seek universal moral principles in a universe composed of multiplicity of being; and,
second, about our own tendencies to “know” and argue “what is right” even as we are
always deeply situated in multiple relations and the relational ethics thereof. Ethical
debate is perspectival, contextual, and political as much as it is unavoidable in how we
negotiate our relations on this planet and indeed with the planet.

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 ­c hapter 33

De l iberation a nd G l oba l
Governa nc e

Jens Steffek

Deliberation has been a central topic on the agenda of political theory since the early
1990s. Students of democracy became particularly interested in the virtues of deliber-
ation, and formulated the conception of “deliberative democracy” that found many fol-
lowers. In more recent years, scholars of International Relations (IR) and law joined in
the trend and began to explore the purchase of deliberation in political settings beyond
the democratic state. Their studies quite often resulted in calls for more inclusive institu-
tions and civil society access to the manifold processes of “global governance,” in order
to enhance the epistemic quality of decision-​making and citizen control over global
political processes. Support for deliberative democratization and participatory govern-
ance on a global scale is far from unanimous, however. Critics of such proposals con-
tend that the institutional environment at the international level cannot accommodate
meaningful practices of deliberation and citizen participation. Due to the lack of a world
state and a global constitution, they argue, international politics is poorly shielded from
intrusions of illegitimate military, economic, and social power.
My purpose in this chapter is to review the current state of the controversy over delib-
eration beyond the democratic state. In the first, largely conceptual part of the text I dis-
entangle several promises of deliberation in global governance, and distinguish micro
and macro conceptions of political deliberation. In the second section I show how
notions of deliberation and communicative action have been applied to IR. I also briefly
review the arguments of the critics. In the third section I scrutinize the evidence we
have about deliberative practices as they currently exist in multilateral intergovernmen-
tal negotiation and in multi-​stakeholder networks. Given space constraints, I can draw
only on the body of secondary literature that has grown rapidly over the last ten years.
In doing so, I pinpoint a number of problems that seem to compromise the democra-
tizing potential of global deliberative practices: enduring asymmetries in actor power
and status; high levels of expertise as precondition for successful intervention; limited
possibilities of connecting micro-​settings of deliberation to macro-​level debates that are
 Deliberation and Global Governance    441

accessible to members of the general public. My conclusion is that existing forms of glo-
bal political deliberation have the potential to increase the epistemic quality of decisions
made for the people but that, with a view to the empirical record, it would be hazardous
to interpret them as a case of self-​governance by the people.

Deliberation and Deliberative

Democracy

The concept of deliberation pertains to the examining and weighing of reasons for or
against certain courses of action. Deliberation typically occurs when a choice between
options is necessary and imminent, but when there is still time for systematic reflection.
In such situations, an examination of reasons for or against certain courses of action
may take place foro interno, within the mind of one individual. Today, however, deliber-
ation is usually conceived as a conversation between two or more persons. It is a social
interaction that can take place whenever individuals jointly decide what to do, in fam-
ilies, firms, parliaments, court juries, or civic associations. Deliberation may be defined
as a process of collective will-​formation, in which participants seek to convince each
other by giving reasons for proposals and are willing to revise their own opinion in the
light of reasons given by others (Chambers 2003: 108–​9). Deliberation thus conceived
requires participants to commit to a very particular style of communication: dispassion-
ate, respectful, justificatory, and responsive to others. Therefore, not every conversation
on political matters qualifies as deliberation. Typical techniques of bargaining, such as
threats or promises to manipulate the position of another participant, are not admis-
sible. Likewise, the display of emotions such as anger, fear, and disgust is considered
harmful to the quality of deliberation. Deliberation may directly precede moments of
decision-​making but not necessarily so. “Deliberative polling,” for instance, is a tech-
nique of opinion formation among citizens unrelated to imminent political choices
(Fishkin and Luskin 2005).
Many political theorists conceive deliberation and democracy as natural friends, even
if there does not seem to be a necessary connection between the two concepts. Pointing
out the advantages of parliamentary and public deliberation, theorists pitch “deliberative
democracy” mainly against the idea that majority voting should be the key mechanism
to generate democratic legitimacy. Advocates of deliberation also challenge the assump-
tion that citizens have fixed interests that simply need to be balanced. Deliberation, they
suggest, can help citizens “discover aspects both of proposed solutions and of their own
objectives that they had not perceived earlier” (Manin 1987: 352). The ambition of delib-
erative democracy is to make reasoned consensus possible through the transformation
of individual preferences and worldviews, not just brokering compromises between
preconceived positions. Thus, deliberative democracy is not only a mode of decision-​
making but also an intersubjective learning process. By now, deliberative democratic
442   Jens Steffek

theory has produced a number of different strands and there is no room in this chapter
to discuss them in detail. Instead of attempting a general literature review, I single out
some contentious issues that are of particular relevance to International Political Theory
(IPT). I will, in a first step, identify expected benefits, or “promises,” of deliberation.
Deliberation holds various promises that it seems useful to disentangle even if they
are related. The first promise is epistemic in nature. It is suggested that deliberative
processes will result in reasoned decisions and ultimately in more effective problem-​
solving. This requires that all types of factual information, all relevant aspects of the
issue at stake, and all relevant points of view are taken into consideration. Expert know-
ledge needs to be collected along with the experiences of citizens, and all perspectives
should feed into the deliberation process. A second promise of deliberation is that it
will induce learning and conciliation at the actor level. Being involved in a deliberative
conversation, it is claimed, may foster trust among participants and have them revise
their opinions and tacit assumptions in the light of competing points of view. What is
more, settling conflict by way of reasoned consensus seems ethically preferable and also
empirically more sustainable than imposing solutions top-​down. A third promise of
deliberation is that procedures of decision-​making will become more legitimate when
all those affected by a decision have a voice in the process that leads to consensus.
This list reveals that not all promises of deliberation are intimately tied to democracy,
understood as self-​governance of citizens in virtue of their collective autonomy. The epi-
stemic quality of decisions, at least when understood narrowly as their problem-​solving
capacity, should matter to all kinds of organizations, and the same holds for learning.
The conciliatory and legitimating aspects, by contrast, direct our attention to the rela-
tions between those making a decision and those affected by it. They hence have more
immediate implications for democracy as self-​governance. Indeed, for many political
theorists and public policy scholars, deliberation requires broad participation to be
meaningful for democracy. This point also illustrates the great importance attached to
procedures in the literature on deliberative democracy. Authors debate where exactly
deliberation should take place; how closely it is tied to formal political institutions; and
how citizens can get access to it.
To shed light on the crucial question of who actually deliberates, and how, it seems
useful to distinguish between micro and macro settings of deliberation (Hendriks
2006). In micro settings of deliberation, conversations take place face to face. Such
micro settings may be embedded into formal political institutions where binding deci-
sions are taken. This is what Nancy Fraser (2007) called the “strong publics.” Micro
settings of this kind are usually regulated by public law and populated by elected or
otherwise designated representatives of citizens. Parliaments and their committees
fall into this category. Deliberative micro settings may also be designed as democratic
innovations that strengthen direct citizen input in the form of deliberative polling, con-
sensus conferences, citizen juries, etc. (Fishkin 2011). Macro settings of deliberation, by
contrast, are communicative networks without a discernable centre. In Fraser’s termin-
ology, they constitute the “weak publics.” Among theorists of deliberation, John Dryzek
in particular emphasized the role of de-​centred public debates that unfold in such infor-
mal networks. These transnational conversations are not where decisions are taken but
where opinions form.
 Deliberation and Global Governance    443

A final conceptual point that deserves mentioning is that political deliberation is not
only a philosophical ideal but also an empirical phenomenon that can be observed and
analysed. Political scientists have endeavoured to gauge the deliberative quality of real-​
world conversations, and to critically study the functioning of (supposedly) deliberative
political institutions in action (Thompson 2008). The recent “systemic” turn in the aca-
demic literature on deliberation promises to bring normative theorizing and empirical
social science closer together in the study of complex systems of deliberation where dif-
ferent settings and levels interact with each other (Mansbridge et al. 2012). The empirical
side of deliberation has also been of great interest to the global governance literature
because international relations constitute, prima facie at least, a rather unlikely environ-
ment for deliberation to take place. In the remainder of this contribution, I will there-
fore study not only how political theorists applied the concept of deliberation to the
global level but also how the realities of deliberation were explored by more empirically
minded scholars.
Despite their purported advantages, the notions of deliberation and deliberative
democracy attracted criticism. Yet even if polemic titles of publications sometimes
suggest otherwise, few political theorists seem to be critical of political deliberation as
such. They instead have reservations against deliberative procedures supplanting other
methods of democratic decision-​making (Sanders 1997). Critics argue that important
preconditions for deliberation may not be present in the real world of politics, and the
consequences of deliberation may not be those that theorists expect. Regarding precon-
ditions, probably the most pressing issue is inequality among participants, caused by
diverging levels of formal education, experience in public speaking, gendered role mod-
els, and, not least, individual personality traits. An Oxford don and an illiterate migrant
woman are unlikely to command the same power of argument in public debate. Social
status, skills, and habitus inevitably privilege some speakers over others. As a conse-
quence, the advance of deliberative procedures may eventually reinforce, rather than
mitigate, the elite bias of modern politics.
A second line of criticism targets the outputs of deliberation. Critics question the epi-
stemic advantages and especially the transformative potential of deliberative proced-
ures. In particular, when consensus is the goal groups are liable to “groupthink,” i.e. tend
to exclude positions and pieces of information that contradict the dominant view in the
group (Janis 1972). Not considering possible alternatives will lead to inferior choices. In
a similar vein, “group polarization” is the tendency for groups with relatively homoge-
neous pre-​deliberation views to radicalize in the process of deliberation (Sunstein 2002).
The empirical record shows that these hazards are real but that they do not seem to affect
all deliberative fora (Karpowitz and Raphael 2014: 137–​43). Much seems to depend on
the concrete circumstances under which the conversation takes place.

Deliberation Goes Global

Since the late 1990s, the ideal of deliberation has gained clout also in the field of
IR and IPT. Proposals abound on how to make governance beyond the state (see
444   Jens Steffek

Chapter 29)—​no matter if European, intercontinental, or global in scope—​more delib-

erative in character. In what follows, I will use “global governance” as an umbrella term
to catch all modes of transboundary decision-​making, no matter if they are intergov-
ernmental, mixed public–​private, or purely private in character. Not all governance
arrangements discussed under this heading are truly global in scope. Some are limited
to specific continents, such as Europe, or transcontinental spheres such as the “OECD
world.” Although the term “deliberation” has become fashionable in recent years, praise
for deliberative governance can be found in much older writings about international
politics. To pick just one example, in the 1920s the British diplomat James Arthur Salter
expressed “the idea that even a particular negotiation should not be of the nature of a
bargain; that there is for most questions somewhere a just solution independent of the
relative strength of the contending parties, and that the question should be settled on
these its intrinsic merits” (Salter 1921: 257). The ideal that Salter pursued was not global
democracy but a public international organization legitimated by the epistemic quality
of its decisions. Deliberation was envisaged as taking place among experts of national
public services, not citizens.
Later in the twentieth century, Salter’s diplomatic ideal found more sophisticated
underpinnings in social and political theory. I will briefly introduce this new generation
of political thought with the help of the distinction between micro and macro settings of
deliberation. Advocates of deliberative micro settings envisage a conversation between
actors that takes place face to face in the institutions of global governance. Jürgen
Habermas’s theory of communicative action, for instance, was applied to IR based on
the idea that deliberation or “arguing” could take place among diplomats (Risse 2000).
The approach was not overtly normative but was nonetheless based on the presumption
that arguing was a preferable mode of political interaction. Truly normative proposals
for deliberation in global governance usually start from the observation of a legitim-
ation crisis and/​or a democratic deficit. Since the 1990s, global international organiza-
tions and the European Union (EU) have been confronted with unprecedented waves of
public protest. These protests effectively debunked the myth that there was a permissive
consensus among citizens about the tasks and competences of international organiza-
tions installed in their name.
A great number of deliberative proposals for reform have been formulated in
response to this legitimation crisis. Most of them are centred on deliberative micro set-
tings. The notion of “direct-​deliberative polyarchy” suggests an experimentalist form
of transnational governance in which deliberation takes place face to face and simul-
taneously at various levels (Gerstenberg and Sabel 2001). This proposal elaborates on
ideas of “deliberative supranationalism” in the EU, which suggested that deliberation
among experts can lead to more rational regulatory results and better problem-​solving
(Joerges and Neyer 1997). Others envisaged constitutional conventions and a strength-
ened European Parliament as a deliberative body to “inject the logic of impartial justifi-
cation and reason-​giving” into the EU polity (Eriksen and Fossum 2002: 419). In the first
years of the twenty-​first century, deliberative approaches to EU governance had become
so popular that some diagnosed a “deliberative turn” in European studies (Neyer 2006).
 Deliberation and Global Governance    445

Proposals for deliberative democratization have not been confined to the particu-
lar institutional environment of the EU. Enhancing the quality of deliberation in vari-
ous types of micro settings was also promoted as a strategy for reforming international
organizations (IOs) more generally (Verweij and Josling 2003).
As outlined above, deliberation and participation are closely entwined. Scholars
who defend deliberative ideals have suggested opening up cloistered IO bodies to civil
society for enhanced scrutiny and argumentative input. According to them, the strat-
egy of participation cum deliberation has several advantages. Civil society presence in
IOs may lead to better-​informed decisions but also could make these institutions more
transparent to the outside, letting the public know and critically debate what is happen-
ing within them (Steffek and Nanz 2008: 9). Enhanced civil-​society participation thus
may improve the accountability of IOs towards a wider, transnational audience (Scholte
2004; see Chapter 34). Deliberation has also been listed as a desirable feature for private
forms of transnational governance, such as standard-​setting (Dingwerth 2007). Not
least, international institutions themselves seized upon the emerging discourse of broad
consultation and direct citizen participation. The European Commission, for instance,
asserted in its 2001 White Paper on Governance that “[t]‌he legitimacy of the EU now lies
with the participation of its citizens.”1
A second type of deliberation proposed for global affairs is of the macro variety, tak-
ing place in large-​scale public spheres rather than in assemblies. James Bohman, for
one, proposed a deliberative-​republican version of transnational democracy, trying to
take into account the decentred nature of political authority at the transnational level.
To challenge these new forms of authority, Bohman envisaged “distributed publics”
that emerge in networked forms of trans-​border communication, which the internet
made possible (Bohman 2007: 15). John Dryzek elaborates on the global public sphere
in a similar fashion, putting emphasis on what he calls “discursive contests.” The inter-
national system with its lack of central governmental authority is, in Dryzek’s view,
particularly amenable to deliberative democratization: “In the absence of central gov-
ernment authority and networks, a large part of the work of coordination of collective
choices is done by discourses themselves, and by their relative weight as revealed in their
contestation and engagement” (Dryzek 2010: 185). Speakers in the global public sphere
include a variety of actors. Politicians, IOs, industry representatives, non-​governmental
organizations (NGOs), journalists, and experts are all involved in this ongoing process
of conversation and contestation. What these speakers represent are, for Dryzek, not
persons or interest, but “discourses.”
To summarize, both micro and macro conceptions of deliberation and deliberative
democracy were developed originally with a view to domestic politics but became trans-
ferred to a new and radically different context. Deliberation in international institutions
is not embedded into the institutional framework of the constitutional state. No mon-
opoly of legitimate power exists at the global level, and no political authority is able to
guarantee the implementation of commonly agreed norms and rules. To what extent
the conditions of “international anarchy” impact the chances for deliberation is a con-
tested issue. Defending a Habermasian approach, Jennifer Mitzen argues that publicity
446   Jens Steffek

of politics and the public use of reason can mitigate the effects of anarchy (Mitzen 2005).
In a similar vein, Dryzek believes that the conspicuous lack of central political authority
in the international system is not necessarily a problem for global democracy residing
in discursive contests but, to the contrary, can become an advantage. Critics of global
deliberation charge deliberation theorists with “an inverted naturalistic fallacy, not from
is to ought, but from ought to the empirical world” (Jörke 2013: 359). They contend that
the power asymmetries which permeate international negotiation make it unlikely that
communicative action in the Habermasian sense will ever prevail over bargaining. To
shed more light on this controversy, I will in the next section scrutinize the empirical
evidence we have about deliberation in global governance.

The Empirical Record

Micro-​deliberative fora pervade international institutions. They take the form of nego-
tiation rounds, permanent committees to discuss the formulation and implementa-
tion of policies, or they may come as issue-​specific ad hoc consultations or “dialogues”
with external stakeholders. Scholars have been interested in determining to what extent
deliberation really takes place in such settings. As a theorist of IR, Thomas Risse concep-
tualized Habermasian “truth seeking with the aim of reaching a mutual understanding
based on a reasoned consensus” as an empirical phenomenon, one possible mode of
diplomatic interaction among others (Risse 2000: 1–​2). He suggested that IR scholars,
traditionally more geared towards studying power and national interest, should take
instances of deliberation into account when trying to explain the dynamics of inter-
national negotiation. Diplomatic practice, Risse claimed, was imbued with moments
of collective truth-​seeking. In an empirical study inspired by this hypothesis it proved
difficult, however, to document the existence of such moments of deliberation in inter-​
state diplomacy (Deitelhoff and Müller 2005: 171). The key methodological problem that
researchers encountered was how to pinpoint the intentions of the speakers as ultimate
proof of their truth-​seeking attitude. On the other hand, and for essentially the same
reason, it seems equally difficult to verify the critics’ claim that the adaptation of inter-
national norms takes place through “processes of enforcement” (Jörke 2013: 360). From
the textual record alone it is all but impossible to show that diplomatic consensus was
brought about by persuasion, coercion, or any other causal mechanism, such as cost–​
benefit calculations.
Scholars thus turned from the textual record to the scope conditions of deliberation
(Risse and Kleine 2010). This interest in scope conditions of deliberation parallels the
approach chosen by normatively inclined scholars. As explained above, this concep-
tion of deliberative democracy puts much emphasis on procedure. Analysts interested
in the deliberative quality of micro settings often scrutinize the institutional conditions
under which deliberation takes place, rather than assessing the textual record alone.
These institutional conditions, it is argued, affect the capacity of the political institution
 Deliberation and Global Governance    447

to bring about free, informed, and inclusive deliberation. Such an analysis needs a set of
theory-​guided criteria. Indicators in use differ, but research programmes usually focus
on access to deliberation, transparency of proceedings (especially access to documents),
and potential moments of exclusion. Another issue critically debated is the responsive-
ness of the institution to the demands voiced by the participants, especially materially
disadvantaged ones (Nanz and Steffek 2005).
Access to deliberation determines who can make their voice heard in international
political conversations. Large comparative studies found that, generally speaking,
access of non-​state actors to international organizations has increased enormously over
the last decades (Tallberg et al. 2013). This includes not only their presence at meetings
but also their right to speak and the opportunity to submit documents. However, the
different groups are not participating evenly. Many authors argue that groups from the
global North tend to dominate the scene, and business associations are more numer-
ous than general interest representatives. Although there is good evidence to show that
this is often the case, we would be well-​advised not to generalize too quickly. A study of
civil society participation at the World Trade Organization (WTO) found that NGOs
from the global South were better represented at its meetings than were Southern busi-
ness groups. For non-​state actors from the OECD world, the opposite was true (Piewitt
2010: 480).
The transparency of many international institutions has improved over time, in par-
ticular with regard to public access to documents. In most IOs, getting access to docu-
mentation, even negotiation drafts, is far easier now than it was twenty years ago. On
the other hand, it seems that transparency of proceedings does not necessarily lead to
higher quality of deliberation. Interview-​based studies found that even business lobby-
ists were more frankly trying to convince their interlocutors in closed meetings and that
they voiced more self-​interested arguments in public than in private settings (Naurin
2007: 144). In this case, Jon Elster’s civilizing “forum effect” does not seem to prevail
over the advantages of privacy (Elster 1986). In public, political actors feel pressed to
send messages to their home constituencies showing how hard they fight for their inter-
ests. If Naurin is correct, publicity of proceedings seems to be a mixed blessing for the
deliberative quality of global governance. On the one hand, it facilitates outreach to a
wider audience. On the other, publicity of proceedings may decrease the willingness of
political actors to openly engage with arguments presented by others and lead to postur-
ing. The old diplomatic wisdom that privacy of conversations fosters greater chances of
understanding and consensus seems to have some truth to it.
For a typical IR scholar focused on power relations, the responsiveness to arguments
brought forward by small states or non-​state actors is the litmus test of deliberation.
Their arguments would need to have equal weight in the deliberation and equal chances
of success. Empirical studies about the evolution of particular negotiation texts show
that this is not the case. Even when negotiators take the arguments of non-​state actors
seriously in the beginning, many of these points fall by the wayside during the course
of negotiations (Dany 2014). Timing seems to play the decisive role here. In the early
phases of negotiations participants sound out options and indeed weigh alternatives on
448   Jens Steffek

their merits, no matter who formulated them. Many of these options, however, drop out
as negotiations move to the final phase, when a deal needs to be struck among the most
powerful factions. This pattern is confirmed by evidence from consultation processes in
the EU (Friedrich 2011; Naurin 2009).
Recent research on the expertocratic bias of many international institutions also has
implications for the prospects of deliberative democracy on a global scale (Gornitzka
and Holst 2015). Most participants in international micro settings of deliberation qual-
ify as experts in the matter under discussion, even if they have different institutional
affiliations. This is unsurprising, given the highly technical matters that many IOs are
working on, and the technocratic culture of these institutions. To succeed in such an
environment, participants need high levels of expertise, language skills, and the hab-
itus of international professionals. This is documented by studies on the opening of
EU policy consultations to a wider public (Ferretti and Lener 2008). Bringing citizens,
in the sense of lay people, directly into such expert conversations is inconsequential,
and in the end often frustrating for all those involved. Nevertheless, there still is an epi-
stemic advantage in opening micro settings to more participation and public scrutiny.
Openness may expose experts to counter-​expertise formulated by dissenters and thus
help protect micro settings from the pitfalls of “groupthink.”
To be meaningful for democracy as self-​governance, bringing more points of view
into expert bodies requires the presence of an effective intermediary structure that
bridges the gap between citizens’ “lifeworld concerns” and the technical jargon of the
regulators. Some of these potential intermediaries presumably are part of what is called
global civil society, a worldwide web of expert NGOs and partisan think tanks. There is
nothing romantic or “grassroots” about this global civil society that walks in and out of
international organizations and commissions. It is a transnational elite of highly trained
individuals, talking to other experts in the language of science, economics, and law. To
function as transmission belts to citizens, these experts need to be in touch with the
basis of their organization. Studies of EU civil society show that there often are many
organizational layers between the international representatives of an NGO and its indi-
vidual membership (Kohler-​Koch 2010).
Linkages, it seems, are crucial for deliberative democratization of transnational gov-
ernance to succeed. In that respect, it also remains an open question how micro and
macro settings can be linked in global systems of deliberation, and how global public
deliberation will translate into global policy choices. My impression is that both micro
and macro approaches need to confront the challenge of linkage. One question is how
the results of micro deliberation in formal institutions can be effectively communicated
to the global public sphere, so that expert opinion is scrutinized by members of a wider
public. Discursive contests in decentred public spheres are open to many more inter-
locutors, and can more easily absorb arguments formulated by lay people. On the other
hand, people without internet access, without writing skills, or without a good com-
mand of a major language of international conversation are unlikely to engage in some-
thing like a global public debate. The inequalities in the distribution of critical skills that
critics of deliberative democracy denounced with regard to small-​scale deliberation
 Deliberation and Global Governance    449

in Western democracies are accentuated in a global perspective. Elite bias, it seems,

remains a major challenge even for macro theories of global deliberation.
Another open question is how decision-​makers can be made responsive to the opin-
ions that form in micro and macro settings of deliberation. Politicians, in particular in
democratic countries, need to be sensitive to shifts in public discourse and opinion. At
the national level, electoral accountability provides incentives for responsiveness to
public opinion. Recall that, for Habermas, parliamentary bodies are the ones that trans-
form the influence of the public sphere into legitimate political decisions (Habermas
1996: 371). Due to the egalitarian principle of one person, one vote, the prospect of gen-
eral elections functions as an antidote to the potential elite bias in deliberation. At the
global level, there is obviously no comparable incentive for politicians to respect global
public opinion when their re-​election depends on national constituencies (Steffek 2010:
62). National audiences may adopt the transnational point of view but certainly not
when transnational conflicts pitch nations (and hence electorates) against each other.
Europe’s currency crisis is a textbook example to illustrate the point that national audi-
ences radicalize while elected politicians compromise diplomatically. “Group polariza-
tion,” it seems, does not only affect face-to-face deliberations but may take possession of
large-​scale publics.

Conclusion

Deliberation is en vogue in IPT. Scholars interested in the empirical dynamics of inter-

national negotiations have turned to it and, more importantly perhaps, deliberation has
become a central element of blueprints for reforming global political institutions. In
academic discourse, a wide range of proposals is on offer now, from deliberative inter-
governmentalism over transnational citizen assemblies to deliberative public spheres of
global scope. Even some international institutions, such as the EU, have taken up the
rhetoric of including citizen voices in their proceedings. This affinity is not incidental.
The epistemic promises of deliberation are easily integrated into conventional legitim-
ation narratives of IOs that present themselves as a form of “rational public administra-
tion” defending the common good of a global constituency. Transnational deliberation
holds the promise of making global governance more rational and at the same time
more participatory and inclusive. Is this too good to be true?
Both micro and macro settings of deliberation already exist at the transnational level.
In my critical discussion of the empirical record, I found that both types of settings offer
room for deliberative practices but suffer from an elite bias. In particular, micro set-
tings tend to reflect the technocratic context of depoliticized international institutions
in which they are embedded. International organizations cannot conceal their geneal-
ogy. They are in many important respects a transnational extension of professionalized
bureaucracies. Yet even the emergent macro settings of deliberation, understood in
terms of decentralized transnational public spheres, are not populated by voices from
450   Jens Steffek

the grassroots. They are public spheres of specialists, who hold expert institutions such
as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF to account. This watchdog function, to be
sure, is an advantage in democratic terms. However, at the transnational level, “delib-
erative democracy” seems to struggle with the problem of elite bias, and arguably even
more so than at the national one.
Another critical issue that has been under-​studied so far is the question of how the
various sites of deliberation in global governance are actually linked, or could be linked.
I therefore would like to echo recent calls in deliberative democratic theory for adopt-
ing a systemic perspective. Deliberative institutions should not be studied in isolation,
but with a view to their interaction. Given the complex multi-​level structure of trans-
national policy-​making, it seems both necessary and promising to shift the perspec-
tive towards the interplay of deliberation in micro and macro settings. In this context, it
would be worthwhile to study systematically how deliberative expert bodies embedded
in formal international institutions deal with input or challenges from the informal pub-
lic spheres surrounding them. My conclusion is that existing forms of global political
deliberation have the potential to increase the epistemic quality of decisions made for
the people when they include more information and more points of view, and when they
urge national policy-​makers to justify their choices before an international audience.
In my view it would be hazardous, however, to interpret existing institutional arrange-
ments as a case of democratic self-​governance by the people. On the basis of the existing
evidence, I would not know how to argue that citizens are, in any meaningful sense, the
“authors” of transnational policy choices.

Note
1. Communication from the Commission of 25 July 2001, “European Governance: A White
Paper” [COM(2001) 428 final—​Official Journal C 287 of 12 Oct. 2001].

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 ­c hapter 34

Ac c ou ntabilit y i n G l oba l
E c onomic Gov e rna nc e

Kate MacDonald

Recent decades have witnessed the meteoric rise of accountability as a concept, dis-
course, and political practice. The expansive embrace of accountability evident in
national governance settings throughout the Anglosphere has extended to many
domains of global governance, perhaps most strikingly in the fields of environmental
and economic governance—​the latter of which is the subject of this chapter. Global eco-
nomic governance is interpreted broadly here to encompass cross-​border governance
of trade, finance, and direct investment flows, transnational business activity, and the
financing of a broad range of international development activities.
Although definitions of accountability have proliferated, many prominent accounts of
accountability have converged around a core understanding of accountability as a moral
or institutional relationship in which one actor (or group of actors) is accorded entitle-
ments to question, direct, sanction, or constrain the actions of another—​thereby provid-
ing a means of defining and enforcing obligations of answerability and responsiveness
in public life (Macdonald 2014). From the perspective of the international political the-
orist—​concerned broadly with normative questions about the organization of inter-
national political relationships—​investigations of accountability are oriented towards
specifying how transnational accountability mechanisms can structure and constrain
the exercise of transnational governance authority in ways that oblige decision-​mak-
ers to respond appropriately to the concerns of those they govern. To inform practical
political action in this way, theories of global accountability must be capable of bring-
ing normative analysis of political responsibility and its justification together with more
materialist empirical analysis of both structural social power and real-​world strategies
of institutional design, operation, and reform.
Fortunately for the aspiring realist accountability theorist, international theoret-
ical debates about accountability have rarely been afflicted with the detachment from
“real-​world” problems and politics that has been criticized in other domains of inter-
national theory. Normatively oriented analyses of transnational accountability have
consistently taken as their starting point real-​world accountability problems that have
been concretely experienced and politically articulated by specific global constituencies
454   Kate MacDonald

(Freeden 2012; Miller 2016). Moreover, empirical analysis has often been used as a basis
for informing analysis of the feasibility (see Chapter 48) or effectiveness of real-​world
accountability strategies—​based on analysis variously of the capacities and motiv-
ations of key actors, institutional capacities, and functions, or enabling or constraining
social conditions underpinning the establishment and maintenance of accountability
practices in particular domains of economic governance. Also evident in small pock-
ets of transnational accountability research have been more interpretive modes (see
Chapter 1) of empirical inquiry, examining existing social beliefs and practices as a basis
for informing analysis of constitutive questions concerning the meanings and norma-
tive purposes of transnational accountability.
The specific manner in which empirical inquiry has informed normative analysis
has varied significantly in relation to transnational accountability problems of differ-
ent kinds. To capture some of this variation, and associated implications for normative
accounts of accountability, this chapter is organized around discussion of four dis-
tinctive problems of global accountability: first, the problem of unaccountable power
within global governance processes; second, the problem of decentred political author-
ity in global governance; third, problems establishing appropriate foundations of social
power through which normatively desirable transnational accountabilities can be ren-
dered practically effective at multiple scales; finally, problems associated with the need
to traverse significant forms of social and cultural difference in negotiating appropriate
normative terms of transnational accountability relationships.
The analysis that follows considers each of these four global accountability problems
in turn, identifying for each how empirical and normative modes of analysis have been
brought together to help illuminate the problem, and the implications of such realist
analysis for practical prescriptions concerning the operation of global accountability.
These four global accountability problems are shown to be associated respectively with
four kinds of institutional prescriptions: first, the need for established global author-
ities to recognize new categories of accountability holders, and establish corresponding
accountability mechanisms; second, increased reliance on horizontal modes of account-
ability, alongside traditional accountability mechanisms; third, a strengthened focus on
the social underpinnings of transnational accountability at multiple scales—​entailing
accountability strategies that draw social power not only from cross-​border civil-​society
mobilization but also from engagement with a mix of grassroots and elite networks at
national and sub-​national levels; and fourth, approaches to negotiating cross-​cultural
accountability that are sensitive both to varying social and cultural beliefs and to the sys-
tems of material and ideological power in which these are embedded.

The Problem of Unaccountable Power

in Global Economic Governance

One of the most fundamental and widely lamented problems of global accountability is
the basic problem of unaccountable power in global economic governance. Perceived
 Accountability    455

deficits in the accountability of established systems of global economic governance have

been widely identified as a major source of illegitimacy (see Chapter 29).
Early global democratic literature addressing problems of accountability drew atten-
tion to structural accountability deficits resulting from the declining capacity of national
democratic authorities to control key decisions affecting the lives of their citizens, in
the face of powerful cross-​border processes of economic and social interdependence
associated with globalization. Effective democratic control at the national level was
argued to be further undermined by the capacity of international bodies such as the
IMF, economic policy-​makers in influential nations such as the United States, or power-
ful transnational companies to directly influence the decisions of national governments,
or to shape the structural environment in which national governments must act (Held
1995; 2009; Goodhart 2014). Identification of such structural accountability deficits was
accompanied by calls for the creation of more expansively cosmopolitan forms of trans-
national governance authority, in which effective power would be more closely aligned
with democratic responsibility at global scale (Held 2009).
Claims about the prevalence of global accountability deficits have drawn heavily on
empirical analysis of the organization and exercise of global political power, and its
effects on a wide range of individual and collective “stakeholders.” Such analyses have
often focused on the power exerted over people’s lives by large, visible international
organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the World
Trade Organization. Particularly from the early 1990s, such organizations were sub-
jected to sustained condemnation by well-​organized networks of global civil-​society
actors, demanding that they become more accountable to the communities and popu-
lations around the world affected by their decisions (O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and
Williams 2000). While such global governance organizations have always had clear
lines of accountability to member states (Grant and Keohane 2005; Woods and Narlikar
2001), the demand from these civil society organizations was for more overtly demo-
cratic forms of accountability, encompassing a range of affected constituencies situated
within and between individual member states (Grant and Keohane 2005; Goodhart
2014; Fox and Brown 1998).
While theoretical accounts of accountability deficits associated with these highly
visible global governance actors have closely mirrored patterns of real-​world political
mobilization and claim-​making, other global governance scholars have employed crit-
ical empirical analysis of power and authority as a means of revealing accountability
deficits that have been publicly obscured, and correspondingly associated with more
limited forms of political mobilization demanding strengthened accountability. For
example, such analyses have highlighted accountability deficits associated with sys-
tems of private governance that exert significant yet often opaque forms of influence
over global economic activity through formulating regulatory standards in areas such
as international accounting standards or banking and financial regulation (Rudder
2008; Cutler, Haufler, and Porter 1999). Scholars of networked governance and global
administrative law have likewise sought to bring greater visibility and scrutiny to some-
times neglected, yet influential, structures of global economic governance authority
456   Kate MacDonald

such as transnational networks of government officials and regulators (Slaughter 2004;

Chesterman 2008).
Sustained scrutiny and condemnation of unaccountable power in global economic
governance has been associated with innumerable reforms that have been portrayed as
means of strengthening accountability to affected people. Private and multi-​stakeholder
governance systems have been established in many sectors to regulate the operations
of large transnational companies and other influential participants in their global sup-
ply chains, and to provide grievance-​handling channels for those affected by their oper-
ations. In response to periods of intense civil-​society pressure over the past two to three
decades, prominent multilateral development finance organizations such as the World
Bank have increasingly acknowledged the need for their decisions to be answerable to an
expanding array of “stakeholders” outside their own organizations, through increased
transparency, strengthened dialogue with external stakeholders, and provision of access
to grievance procedures for project-​affected people (Suzuki and Nanwani 2005; Park
2010). However, the initiation and consolidation of such accountability systems across
the multiple development finance organizations that operate around the world has been
extremely uneven. Significant accountability gaps persist, and in some instances there is
even evidence of established accountability safeguards unwinding. Such trends reflect
the fragile power of pro-​accountability coalitions at the global level, and the strong
cross-​pressures that confront global development finance agencies, as they seek to bal-
ance obligations to multiple stakeholders with competing interests and values, across
widely varying political environments (Macdonald and Miller-​Dawkins 2015).

Accountability for Decentred

Political Authority

Another significant challenge highlighted by theorists of global accountability is the dif-

ficulties of holding to account the diffuse, opaque, and dynamic forms of power exer-
cised through networked and other non-​hierarchical structures of global economic
governance. Characterization of global economic governance as multi-​ layered or
decentred is now commonplace. Such depictions reflect the messy overlaying of mul-
tiple political authorities encompassing national and sub-​national governments, along-
side intergovernmental bodies, private and multi-​stakeholder organizations, and looser
forms of networked coordination (Zurn 2010; Krisch 2006).
Such decentred governance structures are frequently associated with the diffusion of
authority and with blurred lines of responsibility. Attendant accountability challenges
have perhaps most commonly been highlighted in relation to networked forms of glo-
bal governance. For example, Benner, Reinicke, and Witte (2004) examined distinct-
ive challenges of accountability associated with multi-​sectoral public policy networks
in a number of policy fields, including the regulation of global labour standards. In such
 Accountability    457

networks, the absence of a single clear principal or stakeholder constituency to whom

networks should be accountable creates challenges of obscured responsibility and per-
vasive blame avoidance. Bäckstrand’s analysis of networked climate governance simi-
larly highlighted the challenges associated with a plurality of principals in networked
global governance processes, encompassing states, citizens, NGOs, and other actors
(Bäckstrand 2008). Anne-​Marie Slaughter’s study of intergovernmental global govern-
ance networks documented numerous challenges associated with weak transparency,
lack of representative authority, difficulties in regulating power imbalances between
network participants, and the risk of domination by special interests or technical experts
(Slaughter 2004).
Challenges of this kind have motivated numerous prescriptions for strengthening
accountability within networked and multi-​layered governance systems. Slaughter
(2004) proposed several means of strengthening networked accountability, including
increased visibility and accessibility of intergovernmental networks, greater direct par-
ticipation of stakeholders, using government networks to mobilize non-​governmental
actors, and empowerment of sub-​national government units to participate in trans-
national processes (Slaughter 2004). Benner et al. (2004) advocated mechanisms of
collective accountability that would mitigate risks of blame avoidance by promoting
multiple, horizontal checks and balances amongst network participants, drawing on a
mix of reputational, market, legal, and peer-​based accountability mechanisms (see also
Bäckstrand 2008).
Such prescriptions for the strengthened accountability of networked global govern-
ance have often been extended more broadly to other decentred global governance
arrangements. Many scholars of global accountability have called for the pluralization
of accountability mechanisms beyond traditional constitutional or representative mod-
els, to also encompass horizontal accountability mechanisms such as courts and other
oversight or review bodies, auditors, ombudsmen and complaints mechanisms, trans-
parency and disclosure requirements, and monitoring and evaluation systems (Black
2008; Woods and Narlikar 2001; Slaughter 2004). Practical examples of such initiatives
are abundant. Professional and peer review mechanisms are widely used to oversee eco-
nomic policy-​making processes within the OECD. Transparency, market, and repu-
tational mechanisms of accountability are commonly deployed as means of enabling
investors or consumers to hold companies to account for their social and environment
practices, or to enable bond and equity holders to call to account national governments
or multilateral agencies whose activities they help to finance (Koenig-​Archibugi 2010).
Such accountability mechanisms are often viewed as means of making global economic
governance processes more reasoned and publicly justified, if not necessarily demo-
cratic (Chesterman 2008; Kingsbury 2004).
Multi-​layered systems of governance and accountability are also often associ-
ated with highly intermediated accountability arrangements, in which “surrogates”
or “proxies” hold decision-​makers to account, nominally on behalf of primary
accountability holders (Rubenstein 2007; Koenig-​Archibugi and Macdonald 2013).
Such third-​party intermediaries play important roles in shaping or endorsing
458   Kate MacDonald

standards, receiving information about compliance, and sanctioning those who

wield power. Intermediated accountability relationships of this kind are particu-
larly common where normatively recognized principals of transnational account-
ability relationships lack sufficient information, power, or institutional access to
enforce accountability obligations directly. Proxy accountability roles are com-
monly taken on by NGOs or other civil-​society actors, who claim to act on behalf
of others—​whether on the basis of a direct representative mandate or on their own
initiative. Reliance on intermediated accountability relationships poses distinctive
risks and dilemmas with regard to the accountability of intermediaries to ultimate
principals—​particularly when such actors have not been explicitly authorized to act
in such roles, and where their own organizational values or interests diverge from
those of the people they claim to represent. Such risks highlight the need for greater
attention to the quality of accountability processes throughout the complex chains
of accountability that are frequently required to regulate decentred processes of
global governance.
Theorists of transnational accountability have also sometimes highlighted the
dynamic and interactive character of multi-​layered processes of global economic gov-
ernance. Such dynamism generates additional challenges in identifying appropriate
targets of accountability claims, and establishing institutionalized means of linking
decision-​makers to those they affect. The highly dynamic character of transnational and
local political dynamics can make it particularly difficult to identify changing groups
of actors who are indirectly affected by decisions taken in multiple, interacting forums.
Such challenges suggest the need for accountability mechanisms that are equipped to
enable ongoing contestability, revision, and review regarding stakeholder entry and exit,
and to accommodate appropriate forms of recognition and voice for indirectly affected
stakeholders.

Multi-​scale Social Strategies

of Accountability

In any context, accountability strategies need to be analysed not only with reference
to formal political institutions but also in relation to wider regimes of power in which
formal accountability arrangements are embedded. In a transnational context, where
governance institutions tend to be more weakly institutionalized—​lacking the coer-
cive backing of state authority, the perennial challenge for accountability institutions of
establishing an adequate grounding in material social power to regulate the behaviour
of political authorities becomes all the more salient. This practical challenge demands
realist empirical analysis of how regimes of accountability actually function over both
the local and the global scales at which accountability processes are implemented in glo-
bal economic governance.
 Accountability    459

Explicit empirical analysis of the social power relations that underpin and structure
real-​world accountability practices has been particularly widespread amongst scholars
focused on the role of global civil society in shaping evolving regimes of accountabil-
ity (Scholte 2004; Fox and Brown 1998). Such analysis has also been common amongst
scholars of what has sometimes been called “social accountability”—​a broad cluster of
accountability approaches promoted by international development organizations with
the stated aim of strengthening the capacity of citizens and civil-​society organizations
to pressure political authorities to respond to the needs or voices of those they claim to
serve (McGee and Gaventa 2010). Such studies have identified factors at national, sub-​
national, and global scales that enable and constrain the capacity of accountability sys-
tems to empower citizens to make effective demands on decision-​makers. Such factors
include characteristics of citizen capacities and rights awareness; civil-​society resources,
networks, and strategies; political and civic culture and freedoms; state, media, and
party institutions; and structures of informal elite relationships and interests.
Empirical scholarship examining transnational corporate accountability has likewise
been informed by extensive analysis of the social power relations that underpin account-
ability regimes at multiple scales (Garvey and Newell 2005). Yet many of the most influ-
ential analyses of corporate accountability in the field of international political theory
have remained more narrowly focused on the political confrontations between trans-
national companies and affected people and their civil-​society supporters that have
played out on the global stage (Koenig-​Archibugi 2004; Utting 2008). International pol-
itical theorists have given less attention to analysing the interplay between these global
accountability processes and institutions, and the behaviour of transnational businesses
and regulatory authorities at national and sub-​national levels.
To be effective, accountability institutions that seek to regulate the power of trans-
national companies over people’s lives require the capacity to constrain local as well
as global systems of social and political power. In the absence of such capacity, Bartley
(2010) has shown how systems of business accountability pursued through transnational
certification systems can be systematically undermined by resistance from networks of
international investors, local companies, and powerful state elites at national and sub-​
national levels. Similar challenges confront the operation of independent accountability
mechanisms such as ombudsmen or complaint systems linked to international financial
institutions or multi-​stakeholder governance systems (Miller-​Dawkins, Macdonald,
and Marshall 2016). Analysis of such social-​power dynamics demands detailed forms of
empirical “thick description” that can shed light on the micro-​politics of organizational
interests, networks, and ideologies shaping the behaviour of actors in specific social and
political settings (Ebrahim 2009; Olsen 2015). Yet such micro-​level political ethnog-
raphy is often largely absent from the more aerial views of transnational accountability
on which international political theorists tend to focus.
Where multi-​scale empirical analysis of transnational accountability regimes has
been undertaken, it has generated distinctive insights into appropriate prescrip-
tions for the design and operation of transnational accountability. For example, such
analyses have highlighted the need for formal accountability systems associated with
460   Kate MacDonald

international financial institutions or multi-​stakeholder certification schemes to be sup-

plemented by more diffuse social-​empowerment initiatives at the local level, in order to
provide affected people with requisite information, resources, relationships, and bar-
gaining power to make practical use of formally available accountability mechanisms
(Miller-​Dawkins et al. 2016). In some contexts, establishing an effective power base to
support the practical operation of transnational accountability systems requires build-
ing alliances or coalitions that include established elites at national and sub-​national
levels. However, in circumstances where such elites are hostile to the mobilization
and empowerment of grassroots civil-​society organizations, such strategies can risk
reinforcing or legitimizing established patterns of power and exclusion at the local level
(Hughes 2007; Rodan and Hughes 2012). Making strategic prescriptive judgements
about appropriate trade-​offs between competing strategies of institutional empower-
ment demands detailed, contextually responsive forms of empirical analysis.

Cross-​cultural Accountabilities

Another important challenge of accountability in a global governance context is that

accountability institutions must frequently operate cross-​culturally. Such cross-​cultural
accountability relationships commonly arise in fields of global economic governance
such as transnational business regulation and international development finance, where
essentially liberal models of accountability are promoted by companies, NGOs, govern-
ments, or global governance institutions in countries lacking liberal-​democratic polit-
ical traditions and cultures.
Establishing transnational accountability relationships that can be broadly recog-
nized as legitimate in any setting demands negotiation of some mutual understanding
regarding the meaning and purposes of the accountability arrangements being sought.
It also requires some minimal normative agreement between the parties with regard
to the constitutive terms of these relationships—​that is, specification of the entitle-
ments and obligations that the accountability relationships confer. Where transnational
accountability relationships are established between political systems and cultural set-
tings in which diverse understandings of the meanings and purposes of accountability
are prevalent, this frequently creates challenges of cross-​cultural misunderstanding and
disagreement surrounding efforts to negotiate transnational accountability relation-
ships on terms that parties are able to mutually understand and normatively commit to.
One common dimension of this challenge entails obstacles to establishing the con-
ceptual legibility of imported accountability discourses in political and cultural settings
that lack strong liberal-​democratic histories and traditions. It has often been observed
that the term “accountability” has Anglo linguistic origins, and in many languages there
is no straightforward translation of the word. It is commonly translated either nar-
rowly around notions of financial accounting or in terms of broader ideas of responsi-
bility (Bovens 2007). While straightforward linguistic problems of translation may be
 Accountability    461

overcome quite readily in settings where the liberal values and practices that the term
invokes are familiar, problems of conceptual legibility run deeper where linguistic bar-
riers are underpinned also by incompatibilities of social practices, power relations,
and other lived realities to which the language and concept of accountability refer. For
example, as demonstrated in research on accountability practices in the Cambodian
development sector, in authoritarian political regimes in which ordinary people have
few experiences of a responsible and accountable state, and few practical institutional
protections for individual rights, the term can lose not only normative salience but also
deeper forms of intelligibility for many people (ANSA 2010).
Even where overt normative disagreements about appropriate relationships between
citizens and governing authorities are not highly salient, such forms of conceptual and
ontological difference can generate significant forms of what global anthropologist
Anna Tsing has called “friction,” as incompatible rationalities encounter one another
through shared practice (Tsing 2011). To continue the above example of internation-
ally financed development projects operating within Cambodia’s neo-​patrimonial pol-
itical regime, liberal accountability norms grounded in assumptions about individual
rights and democratic citizenship promote normative assumptions that differ signifi-
cantly from locally influential norms regarding the grounding of legitimate authority in
traditional virtues of wisdom, honesty, fairness, respect for social rules, and capacity to
deliver results (Macdonald et al. 2016; ANSA 2010). Such difference need not result in
overt disagreement. Practices such as participatory community meetings to consult on
the expenditure of international donor funds—​often promoted as part of transnational
accountability agendas—​are often at least superficially compatible with established
community decision-​making processes based around village meetings. Nonetheless,
participants in such transnational accountability practices often understand their
meaning, purpose, and sources of legitimacy in different ways—​for example, donors
may view them as vehicles for individual and community empowerment, while local
government or village leaders regard such participatory processes as valuable primarily
insofar as they enable government authorities and citizens to work together to achieve
development goals.
Though such forms of “awkward engagement” (Tsing 2011) need not preclude pro-
ductive engagement in shared practices, they can generate significant patterns of misun-
derstanding. Theorizing such cross-​cultural accountability challenges demands realist
analysis of an interpretive character—​drawing on “empirically ascertainable manifest-
ations of political and ideological practices” at vernacular as well as elite levels, as a basis
for enabling political theory to be sensitive to facts about beliefs and normative commit-
ments in a particular context (Freeden 2012: 1).
Cross-​cultural communication challenges have been extensively explored by pol-
itical theorists in many contexts—​perhaps most prominently in relation to debates
about multiculturalism and pluralism in democratic societies (Taylor 1994; Dallmayr
1996)—​yet they have rarely been applied to analyses of transnational accountability.
Drawing on these broader theoretical insights, recognition of cross-​cultural account-
ability challenges suggests the potential value of parties to cross-​cultural accountability
462   Kate MacDonald

relationships engaging in critical processes of cross-​cultural dialogue and learning—​

seeking actively to understand the differing assumptions and aspirations of others,
to reflect on their own positions of relative power, and to consider calling some basic
convictions into question through processes of mutual learning, adjustment of moral
standards, and development of new vocabularies of comparison (Taylor 1994). When
significant “frictions” between different rationalities and practices persist, ongoing
joint participation in shared accountability practices can contribute further to building
shared vocabularies, and mutually intelligible and valuable practices of accountability—​
building at least some partial basis for negotiating hybrid accountability practices that
may be appropriate in particular contexts of transnational encounter.
While such dialogue-​and practice-​based approaches to building cross-​cultural
accountabilities can help to build shared understandings of what is reasonable and valu-
able (Van Der Stoep 2004), cross-​cultural frictions take on a more overtly conflictual
character when contrasting vocabularies and rationalities are underscored by conflict-
ing interests and power struggles amongst participants in transnational accountability
encounters. In Cambodia, transnational accountability agendas have been particularly
contentious when they have entailed support for accountability claims by poor commu-
nities concerning the use of land and natural resources, in which local political elites are
heavily invested. In resisting forms of transnational accountability supported by foreign
NGOs, it is common for local elites to invoke local cultural norms as means of delegitim-
izing transnational accountability claims. For example, paternalistic norms that stress
the responsibility of leaders to promote collective processes of development have been
invoked as a basis for legitimizing the repression of community dissent to the activities
of foreign investors or large-​scale economic development projects (Rodan and Hughes
2012). With powerful elites seeking to represent traditional values in ways that serve the
reinforcement of prevailing power relations, the ideological character of representations
of “authentic” local beliefs and normative commitments complicates efforts to engage
in cross-​cultural interpretation and dialogue—​blurring the lines between cultural fric-
tion and more materialist conflicts of power and interest. Realist analyses of such power
struggles highlight the need for cross-​cultural dialogue to be critically attentive to ques-
tions of whose interests are served by particular representations of local culture, and the
ways in which social and ideological power shape competing representations of cultural
norms in negotiations surrounding the terms of transnational accountabilities.

Concluding Reflections

The accountability challenges mapped above reflect a real world of global economic
governance and accountability which is culturally diverse, multi-​layered, and very
unevenly institutionalized. Such challenges demand distinctive theoretical and meth-
odological approaches to the task of developing action-​guiding, normative accounts of
what accountability in global economic governance ought to look like.
 Accountability    463

Prescriptively, the analysis presented above has underlined the value of accountabil-
ity arrangements that are multi-​layered and pluralist—​both in the sense of recognizing
multiple sites of global authority and associated accountability constituencies, and in
the sense of encompassing a plural array of institutional forms, embracing horizontal
alongside more traditional hierarchical mechanisms of accountability. It has pointed to
the need for explicit strategies of social mobilization and coalition-​building as a basis
for establishing the material social power required to render transnational accountabil-
ity systems functionally effective and politically sustainable. And it has highlighted the
importance of fostering forms of cross-​cultural dialogue in the negotiation of trans-
national accountability relationships that are sufficiently open and adaptable to accom-
modate cultural difference, while also reflecting critically on how representations of
culturally salient meanings and purposes of accountability are themselves embedded
within broader regimes of social power.
The forms of empirical evidence required to inform such prescriptive analysis have
been shown to be highly variable—​encompassing analysis of the feasibility or effective-
ness of different accountability strategies, and existing beliefs and practices concern-
ing the meanings and normative purposes of transnational accountability in particular
contexts. Such evidence has been developed and applied in quite uneven ways to trans-
national accountability problems of different kinds. In general, existing literature on
transnational accountability has tended to focus more on the macro-​level empirical
study of formal institutions of authority and accountability than on the micro-​level
study of more diffuse and decentred processes of cultural beliefs and practices, social
power, and sub-​national dynamics of informal political power. More systematic study
of transnational social processes at micro as well as macro scales could usefully inform
the development of realist prescriptions for transnational accountability systems better
suited to the complexities of contemporary global economic governance.
How then might we reflect on our invitation as contributors to engage in renewed
contemplation of the vocation and basic purpose of international political theory? If
we understand such theory as oriented towards critical appraisal and prescription of
political institutions and wider political practices, then this contribution has sought
to show how analysis of accountability in international theory can be enriched by the
tighter integration of empirical and normative approaches of diverse kinds. Empirical
and normative scholars need each other, or both risk straying from the central polit-
ical problems of their day. In seeking to maintain such engagement, normative scholars
may sometimes simply borrow empirical insights from established bodies of empiric-
ally oriented political research in related fields. However, the specific kinds of facts that
normative theorists reach for in seeking both to interpret established social practices
and to make predictions about the consequences of feasible and accessible political
and institutional strategies do not always map onto bodies of empirical research that
have been developed for quite different purposes. Such mismatches have meant that to
date, the capacity of realist analysis to adapt to the differentiated accountability prob-
lems that confront architects of global economic governance has remained limited in
important ways.
464   Kate MacDonald

Rising interest in realist modes of political theory have led numerous political theor-
ists to “go public to fault their subdiscipline for its flaws” for failing to engage adequately
with empirical analysis (Honig and Stears 2011: 177). It is rarer to see empirical-​
accountability scholars engage in similar self-​castigation for failing to shape their
research agendas and methodological approaches in accordance with the demands of
their normatively oriented colleagues. Yet engagement between normative and empir-
ical scholars needs to run in both directions. Such engagement is necessary not only to
ensure that available empirical facts can be incorporated appropriately into normative
theory development, but also so that required empirical insights can be identified and
acquired in the first place. Deep, two-​way engagement between normative and empir-
ical sub-​fields of political inquiry is needed to inform both the imagination and the
realization of transnational accountability systems capable of pressuring global eco-
nomic governance actors to respond to the needs or desires of those they govern.

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 ­c hapter 35

Gl obal Gove rna nc e i n

t he “Anthrop o c e ne ”

Frank Biermann

For millennia, humans have altered their natural environment. In the last decades,
they have begun to change our entire planet. Growing scientific evidence suggests that
the earth system has moved outside the range of natural variability that it has exhibited
over the last half a million years. As stated in a joint declaration signed in 2001 by all
major global research programmes, “The nature of changes now occurring simultan-
eously in the Earth System, their magnitudes and rates of change are unprecedented”
(Amsterdam Declaration 2001; see also UNEP 2012). It is increasingly accepted that
this fundamental transformation requires paradigmatic changes that better capture
this new reality. In 2000, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed
that human activities have now so profoundly altered the planet as to push it into a new
geological epoch—​what they called the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000;
Crutzen 2002). The term “Anthropocene” is meant to mark a new epoch in planetary
history, separating it from previous ones such as the Holocene, which refers to the last
12,000 years before the present. The neologism “Anthropocene” combines the two key
elements that mark our “new Earth”: the Greek suffix -​cene (new), denoting the nov-
elty of this epoch in planetary history, and the Greek word for our species (anthropos),
which has evolved into the dominant factor transforming our planet.
The concept of an Anthropocene is now widely used in a variety of contexts, com-
munities, and connotations (Brondizio et al. 2016). Geologists, for example, explore
the chemical, physical, and biological characteristics of the Anthropocene, and debate
whether and when this new geological epoch has started. For earth system scientists,
the concept encapsulates the radical anthropogenic alteration of the planet’s natural
cycles and systems. More recently, the concept has attracted the attention also of social
scientists and humanists, who seek to take the Anthropocene concept beyond its bio-
physical confines. As shown in a recent bibliometric analysis, while the earth and envir-
onmental sciences have contributed so far most articles addressing the Anthropocene
(64 per cent), articles in humanities and social science journals already account for 24
per cent of the total number of all publications in this field (Brondizio et al. 2016). As
468   Frank Biermann

this bibliometric analysis also suggests, resolving the challenges of the Anthropocene
requires scholars of international relations to engage much more intensely in interdis-
ciplinary dialogues with other scientific communities, notably the natural sciences.
Also, political scientists are inevitably more expected to engage in intense dialogues
with decision-​makers and stakeholders—​with a view not only to policy advice, but also
to a more fundamental co-​design and co-​production of scientific knowledge.
This chapter explores the possible consequences of this paradigmatic turn, especially
for the field of International Political Theory (IPT). I will first lay out the new challenges
for IPT that have been brought about by the concept of the Anthropocene. I then illus-
trate these challenges with an example: the increasing need of governments to define
and agree upon “desirable” futures for planetary evolution.

Challenges for International

Political Theory

Processes of earth system transformation and the emergence of the “Anthropocene”

pose numerous challenges for IPT as well as for real-​world political processes.

New Types of Global Interdependence

To start with, the Anthropocene creates, changes, or reinforces multiple interdepend-
ence relations within and among human societies, posing novel challenges for IPT. It
creates new forms and degrees of interdependence among the more than 190 formally
sovereign countries and their national jurisdictions, and the areas beyond national jur-
isdiction, such as the high seas and Antarctica. Some of these new interdependencies
emerge from functions of the earth system that transform local pollution into changes
of the global system that affect other places that often have contributed (much) less to
the problem, with examples being climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, the
global distribution of persistent organic pollutants, and the global spread of species with
potential harm for local ecosystems. The connections are often highly complex, and cut
across traditional lines of political governance. For example, one consequence of the
excessive emission of greenhouse gases is the increasing acidification of oceans world-
wide, which harms coral reefs and in some places fish stocks. In this way, the livelihood
of poor fishing communities in Latin America or Africa is now directly linked to pro-
duction and consumption patterns that have evolved over the last century in the (often
far away) rich countries in the North, creating novel normative challenges also for IPT.
Conversely, countries are becoming also more interdependent through novel inter-
connections when local environmental degradation leads to transregional or global
social, economic, and political crises, for instance through decreases in agricultural
 Global Governance in the “Anthropocene”    469

output that raises food demand and prices. One important potential consequence is
migration. Some estimates have predicted—​although possibly overly pessimistically—​
that climate change will lead to additional migration movements of more than 200 mil-
lion people (so-​called “climate refugees”) by 2050 (Biermann and Boas 2010). The recent
refugee crisis in Europe shows the novel degree of interdependence by which richer
countries are becoming inherently linked to the fate of poorer countries in their proxim-
ity. Even though it is probably too early to classify migrants from the Sahel or from Syria
as “climate refugees,” it is evident that land degradation, drought, and water scarcity are
major underlying causes of what eventually becomes manifest as ethnic, religious, or
regional conflict. In short, the Anthropocene creates a new dependence of states, even
the most powerful ones, on the community of all other nations. This is a defining char-
acteristic as well as a key challenge that may require a more effective institutional frame-
work for global cooperation in numerous domains.

New Types of Functional Interdependence

Secondly, the Anthropocene increases the functional interdependence of human soci-
eties. For example, political response strategies that target one economic sector are
likely to have repercussions for numerous others. Functional interdependence also
relates to the mutual substitutability of response options, which poses special problems
of international allocation. In climate governance, for example, for every global pol-
icy target there are an unlimited number of possible combinations of local responses
across nations and time-​frames with equal degrees of effectiveness. One consequence is
novel types of global problem-​shifting, for instance when rich countries seek to resolve
environmental problems by policies that affect poorer countries through land acquisi-
tion for biofuel production that eventually competes with food production, driving up
food prices especially for the global poor. In the Anthropocene, even simple, age-​old
practices such as meat consumption by humans can have far-​reaching global implica-
tions, reserving vast areas of terrestrial land mass for the raising of cattle, which is much
more energy-​intensive and environmentally polluting per unit of food energy than the
production of non-​meat foods. In a world where still 800 million people are undernour-
ished, even a basic human activity such as meat consumption might thus at some point
need to be addressed in global policies, raising new ethical and moral questions across
national, cultural, and religious divides.
A different and more novel problem for global accountability and IPT is the rap-
idly increasing debate in some highly industrialized countries on geo-​engineering, for
example in the form of “solar radiation management” that would block some sun light,
leading to a temporary cooling of the planet. Such technologies, while still not fully under-
stood, are likely to be cheap enough to be a realistic option for implementation by just a
few countries. This leaves the fundamental question for IPT about the rights and respon-
sibilities of countries: what legal rights and political options do poorer countries have to
stop the more industrialized countries in their efforts of “geo-​engineering,” if they deem
470   Frank Biermann

this too risky? Or do richer countries even have a moral responsibility to unilaterally
engage in geo-​engineering in order “to save the planet,” as some ecomodernists might
argue? In short, increased functional interdependence in the Anthropocene requires new
degrees of effective policy coordination and integration, from local to global levels.

Theoretical Challenges of “Deep-​Time” Interconnections

Thirdly, the Anthropocene is marked by a novel recognition of “deep-​time” inter-
dependencies, inasmuch as causation and effect of transformations of the earth system
are usually separated by hundreds of years and thus several generations.
This raises concrete political conflicts about the responsibility of present gener-
ations for activities of their ancestors, for instance regarding the burning of fossil
fuels in Europe before the greenhouse effect became more widely known in the 1990s.
Developing countries often argue that these “historical emissions” of industrialized
countries should become part of their commitments in global climate governance, in
the form of a “climate debt” that heavily industrialized countries have amassed and have
now to “repay” by extra mitigation efforts. Indeed, even though carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases, once emitted, are eventually taken up again and removed from
the atmosphere (thus reducing the impact of any “historical emissions” over time), there
is no doubt that the overall problem today would be much less without the past industri-
alization trajectory in the North. Yet where to draw the line? What responsibility should
current generations in the North today take for their ancestors’ activities, especially
given that the climate problem was not widely known and accepted before the 1980s?
Conversely, the Anthropocene also links the current people with future generations
over many centuries. Sea-​level rise, for example, is expected within a time-​range of
100 years and more. Such planning horizons exceed the tenure and often the lifetime of
present political leaders. Among other things, this poses the questions of international
credibility and trust that future governments will reciprocate and comply with inter-
national rules, and the problem of democratic legitimacy of policies in the intergen-
erational context. What rights and responsibilities do present generations—​and their
representatives in parliament—​owe to their unborn successors? This question might
find different answers in different regions. Given that some countries—​from the
Netherlands to Bangladesh and many small island nations—​will be much more affected
by the long-​term impacts of climate change than others, how can this be conceptualized
in IPT? How does it affect, for example, the legal recognition of “climate migrants,” given
that they are not recognized under current refugee law, and that there are no other legal
standards that would grant such migrants concrete rights to immigration into other
countries if needed? This is no longer a hypothetical question but a very current and
timely problem for some Pacific island nations that might be inundated in the course of
this century. How can we conceptualize the accountability of all other nations vis-​à-​vis
the plight of these smaller countries that will cease to exist and might thus very soon
require legal recognition as migrant nations?
 Global Governance in the “Anthropocene”    471

New Challenges of Uncertainty

Fourthly, the Anthropocene comes with persistent uncertainty about the causes of
earth system transformation, its impacts, the links between various causes and response
options, and the broader effects of policies. A striking example is stratospheric ozone
depletion, caused over many decades by the emission of a variety of gases used in spray
cans, refrigerators, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, and many other appliances. The
impact of such gases, once so widely used in many countries, on the stratospheric ozone
layer was discovered only half a century after the first gases were produced and emitted,
with humankind thus having been engaged unknowingly in a process that would have
severely harmed human health, food production, and many other vital issues, had it not
been discovered on time.
Also, most ongoing transformations in the earth system, such as global climate
change, are non-​linear and might accelerate at any time. At the time of writing, for
example, it appears that most climate models have been too conservative, and hence
optimistic, in their predictions, and that empirical observations of climate change seem
to confirm the worst-​case predictions in many models. Further surprises in system
behaviour can be expected, but are by definition unforeseeable. This creates a new pol-
itical context, as exemplified by Ulrich Beck’s notion of a global “risk society.” One con-
crete consequence is the growing political influence of the global expert community,
notably in the emergence of the powerful Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
that seeks to bring together thousands of the world’s leading scientists in assessing the
state of our knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change, as well as con-
sidering policy options. Given the tremendous uncertainties around such issues, reports
by this intergovernmental panel have become an important factor in global negoti-
ations, making the expert panel a source of political authority in its own right. While the
power of “epistemic communities” in international relations has been discussed since
the 1990s (starting with Haas 1990), the increasing recognition of the vast complexities
of the Anthropocene is likely to further increase the role of expert networks in inter-
national policies, further exacerbating tensions between governmental decision-​makers
and science communities. Unsurprisingly, the institutionalization of academic and
other expert networks in international relations and at the “science–​policy interface,”
for instance in the United Nations system, has become a quickly expanding research
field in International Relations in itself (van der Hel 2016).

Global Inequality in the Anthropocene

Finally, the Anthropocene is an epoch that sees the human species with extreme vari-
ations in wealth, health, living standards, education, and most other indicators that
define wellbeing (see Chapter 9). According to the World Bank (2008: 4), the richest 20
per cent of humanity account for 76.6 per cent of total private consumption. The poorest
20 per cent, on their part, consume just 1.5 per cent. Almost half of humanity lives on less
472   Frank Biermann

than US$2.5 per day (Chen and Ravallion 2008: 41). The world’s 946 richest people are
worth as a group US$3.5 trillion (Kroll and Fass 2007), while the poorest 25 per cent of
humanity has still no access to electricity (UNDP 2007). Today, one billion people lack
sufficient access to water, and 2.6 billion have no basic sanitation (UNDP 2006). Water
and sanitation for all people would cost about US$9 billion: this is about what people in
the United States spend each year on cosmetics. Europeans invest each year US$11 bil-
lion on ice cream, US$50 billion on cigarettes, and US$105 billion on alcoholic drinks
(UNDP 1998: 37).
Politics in the Anthropocene has to operate in this global situation of large inequalities
in resources and entitlements. For IPT, this places special emphasis on the field of inter-
national justice. Given that global inequalities are growing, what are the consequences for
the rights and responsibilities of countries regarding the solution of global environmental
problems, and for the global adaptation to those impacts that can no longer be avoided?
The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change essentially left it to each country to decide itself what it perceived as its “fair share”
in resolving the climate problem, reflecting the fundamental differences in perceptions
about the requirements of “international justice” (see Chapter 40). On the other hand, the
comprehensive reporting and transparency requirements of the Paris Agreement might
well result over time in a higher level of agreement among different governments on what
each “owes” to the international community, possibly further developing global stand-
ards of what is “fair” in IPT under conditions of the Anthropocene.

The Challenge for Democracy

Last but not least, the Anthropocene poses new, important questions for democracy.
This concerns, for one, democracy at the national level and the key functions of the state
(Eckersley 2004). Here are just a few of the main challenges. Increasing complexities and
uncertainties grant a more prominent role to experts and technocrats, possibly redu-
cing the potential influence of citizens; the deep-​time character of problems requires
new types of democratic legitimacy for actions that affect future generations; increasing
needs of adaptation to possibly accelerating earth system transformations might sup-
port authoritarian discourses of “governance in emergency mode”; and the increasing
reliance—​supported by neoliberal transformations of the state—​on private or public–​
private governance raises new questions of the democratic legitimacy and accountabil-
ity of such new steering mechanisms, such as partnerships or labelling schemes. Not
least, the global character of the Anthropocene, with all resulting interdependencies,
further erodes the steering capacities of individual governments.
At the international level, this has raised the question of whether the United Nations,
built in its core around notions of sovereign equality of states and intergovernmental
diplomacy, is still the appropriate model of global governance in the twenty-​first cen-
tury (see Chapter 29), and in particular with a view to the Anthropocene challenges
that I have outlined in this chapter. Reform proposals abound, from the introduction of
 Global Governance in the “Anthropocene”    473

weighted majority voting to the establishment of a world parliamentarian assembly, or a

global forum of civil society as a second chamber next to the UN General Assembly, or
a global deliberative assembly as suggested by John Dryzek and his colleagues (see the
overview in Biermann 2014: ch. 5). While none of these many proposals is likely to find
much support from governments in the near future, debates on new visions and models
for global democracy are likely to become more central in the study of IPT.

Example: Setting Global Limits

Let me now illustrate, in concrete cases of “real politics,” the new complexities of
accountability, legitimacy, and the role of IPT in the Anthropocene.
One inherent consequence of the Anthropocene notion is the redefinition of human
agency. While humans have reacted to their natural environment for millennia, under
Anthropocene conditions they now recognize themselves as key agents of the evolution
of the entire planetary system. This raises novel, fundamentally normative questions—​
how on earth do we want to have our planet? A simple “return” to the Holocene, the
epoch of the last 12,000 years when human civilization evolved, is hardly possible, given
the numerous changes in earth system parameters that human actions have already
affected, and the resultant changes that we observe today. There is, in other words, no
alternative to governments and other political actors agreeing on the most “desirable”
core parameters for earth system evolution, taking into account of course our limited
understanding of core system processes (Bai et al. 2016). This normative task is inher-
ently a global one and will become a central part of the intergovernmental political
agenda in the future. Even though it is conceivable that governments will eventually not
be able to agree on what they see as “desirable” future states of the earth system, and
even though unilateral decisions by only few countries on earth system parameters are
not to be ruled out, the effects will undoubtedly be felt by all countries and all people,
though to different degrees. In sum, setting global parameters of earth system evolu-
tion becomes a new core function of global governance. But what parameters could be
chosen, and what political processes would be the most appropriate? What political
conflicts are likely or already discernible? What are the challenges for IPT?
One obvious point of reference is the notion of “sustainable development” as the core
normative aspiration (see Chapter 14). Sustainable development has been defined by
the World Commission on Environment and Development in the 1980s: “Humankind
has the ability to make development sustainable—​to ensure that it meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs” (WCED 1987). Yet this definition is broad, and was meant to be broad. As aptly
summarized by Kates, Parris, and Leiserowitz (2005: 10), “This malleability allows pro-
grams of environment or development; places from local to global; and institutions of
government, civil society, business, and industry to each project their interests, hopes,
and aspirations onto the banner of sustainable development.” To provide more focus,
it is common to distinguish three pillars of sustainable development. For example,
474   Frank Biermann

the Johannesburg Declaration adopted at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable

Development posited a “collective responsibility to advance and strengthen the inter-
dependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development—​economic
development, social development, and environmental protection—​at local, national,
regional, and global levels.” Yet how these three pillars are to be weighted and defined
in concrete cases of global governance—​for example, climate change or biodiversity
depletion—​remains undefined, and there is hardly any consensus about this in either
academic or political communities.
One possible way forward is to conceptualize the normative aspiration holistically as
the preservation of human development and wellbeing within the confines of certain
boundary conditions in the earth system. Rockström and colleagues (2009), for example,
have inductively defined nine “planetary boundaries” that could, if crossed, result in a
major disruption in (parts of) the system and a transition to a different state. Disastrous
consequences for humanity could be the result. The threshold values are, to use a related
concept, the “tipping points” in the system. Rockström et al. (2009) originally suggested
boundaries for nine earth system processes: climate change; biodiversity loss; the nitro-
gen cycle; the phosphorus cycle; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; global
freshwater use; land use change; atmospheric aerosol loading; and chemical pollution. For
some of these boundaries, Rockström et al. felt even confident enough to suggest a numeric
threshold value, such as for greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. An import-
ant insight is that three threshold values have been crossed already. Regarding climate
change, we have reached atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of over 400 ppm
(compared to 280 ppm in pre-​industrial times), whereas the threshold value proposed by
Rockström et al. would be 350 ppm. Regarding biodiversity, the current extinction rate
is over 100 extinct species per million species per year, while the suggested threshold is
10 extinctions. As for the nitrogen cycle, humans remove about 121 million tons of nitro-
gen per year from the atmosphere today, while a safe rate, according to Rockström et al.
(2009), is a maximum of 35 million tons. In these three areas, therefore, humankind has
pushed the earth system past tipping points into a new—​and unknown—​world.
Importantly, within this overall target corridor, the concept of earth system boundar-
ies leaves human societies ample space for different political choices and socioeconomic
development trajectories (Biermann 2012; Galaz et al. 2012). These socioeconomic
development trajectories—​within the safe operating space set by the earth system
boundaries—​are not defined by scientists but are left open to the democratic political
process and intergovernmental negotiation. In this sense, the notion of earth system
boundaries is just one element of the overall policy objective of sustainable develop-
ment. They define the broad limitations and “guardrails” for human development, and
are in principle neutral towards human values and aspirations.
Of course, the negotiation of the exact earth system boundary is not simply a mat-
ter for scientists—​it is also a political boundary that needs to be negotiated by political
actors who have to weigh scientific evidence and degrees of uncertainty with their own
assessment of the risks to be taken and the costs to be endured. The earth system bound-
aries are, despite all accuracy in attempts at measurement, in the end a social construct.
 Global Governance in the “Anthropocene”    475

Yet this does not take away from their value for the larger purpose of earth system gov-
ernance. The concept of earth system boundaries provides a framework for scientific
research and political negotiation to define jointly the safe operating space for human
development, and is hence an important element in the study and practice of global
governance.
A concrete example of this normative challenge is the setting of a “temperature tar-
get” in global climate governance (Morseletto, Biermann, and Pattberg 2016). Since the
1980s it had been suggested that a safe target for all climate policy efforts could be the
limitation of global warming to a maximum mean temperature increase of 2 degrees
Celsius above pre-​industrial levels. After prolonged discussions and negotiations, gov-
ernments agreed eventually to this safe boundary value for climate change at the 2009
conference of the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In the
2015 Paris Agreement under this convention, governments even agreed, in addition, to
“pursue efforts to” limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C; this would, if implemented,
vastly increase the survival prospects for small island nations, among numerous other
benefits. Yet the rather vague reference to the 1.5 °C target shows also the political real-
ities of global norm-​setting in this field. The world’s most polluting nations—​in both
North and South—​were simply not willing to agree on any stricter language that would
have committed them more firmly to the emission cuts that would have been required to
reach the 1.5 °C target, even if this would have reduced the risks for the many low-​lying
countries, and in particular small island nations, which simply do not have the power
resources to change the course of global negotiations sufficiently.
As the more general discussion on planetary boundaries has shown, normative tar-
gets for earth system evolution, like a global “temperature target,” are not in any way
a given that simply results from scientific research and assessments. There simply are,
within the confines of human knowledge, no quantifiable “temperature switches” in the
earth system. Even though there is overwhelming agreement that a temperature target
of, say, 1.5 °C vastly reduces the global risks of climate change, in the end the normative
act of setting a target remains a purely political task, and as such the outcome of polit-
ical negotiations at the global level, with all the common elements of power conflicts
and bargaining processes, and with the novel prominent involvement of scientists who
themselves become part of the politics. In sum, there is no doubt that the international
political negotiation of “earth system boundaries”—​and the even more general trend of
global “governance through goals” as evidenced by the new Sustainable Development
Goals (Kanie and Biermann 2017)—​will become a general feature of global governance,
and hence a prime object of study in the field of IPT as well.

Conclusion

In sum, the emergence (or more precisely: the recognition) of the Anthropocene—​the
current epoch in planetary history that is essentially dominated by humans—​affects
476   Frank Biermann

all spheres of political life; IPT is no exception. The Anthropocene brings new types
and degrees of global interdependence that make each country fundamentally more
dependent on all others than has been the case in past processes of economic or cul-
tural globalization. The Anthropocene creates new conflicts about international equity,
posing additional distributive questions for an international society that is already the
most unequal in human history. Distributive conflicts also extend far into “deep time,”
raising novel questions of the responsibility of current generations for the environmen-
tal pollution of their ancestors as well as their responsibility vis-​à-​vis future generations.
Governments also need to cooperate on entirely new types of questions. For example,
as I have described in some detail, the emergence of the Anthropocene now forces gov-
ernments to embark on global negotiations on the “desirable state” of planetary systems.
The recent intergovernmental agreement on a “temperature target” for planet Earth is
just one example of numerous similar political processes that are developing or are likely
to gain speed in the future.
All these developments also call for a new perspective in political science. One such
new perspective is a newly emerging paradigm in the social sciences, “earth system”
governance (Biermann 2014). The earth system governance paradigm is a response
and a reaction in the social sciences to the notion of the Anthropocene. It accepts the
core tenet of the Anthropocene—​the understanding of the earth as an integrated, inter-
dependent system transformed by the interplay of human and non-​human agency. The
focus of earth system governance is not “governing the earth,” or the management of the
entire process of planetary evolution. Instead, earth system governance concerns the
human impact on planetary systems. It is about the societal steering of human activities
with regard to the long-​term stability of geo-​biophysical systems.
The notion of earth system governance now underpins a long-​term global research
initiative under the auspices of the global research programme “Future Earth.” This
initiative—​the Earth System Governance Project—​was launched in 2009 and has
evolved into a broad, vibrant global community of researchers who share an interest
in the analysis of earth system governance and in the exploration of how to reform
the ways in which human societies (fail to) steer their co-​evolution with nature at
the planetary scale. More than 3,000 colleagues are subscribed to the Earth System
Governance newsletter, and about 300 researchers belong to the group of lead faculty
and research fellows closely affiliated with the Project. In preparation for the 2012 UN
Conference on Sustainable Development, members of the Earth System Governance
research alliance advanced a number of concrete proposals for an overhaul of global
governance, for example: to create a new World Environment Organization and a UN
Sustainable Development Council; to better monitor and support private governance
mechanisms; to strengthen the involvement of civil society in international institutions;
and to more often rely on qualified majority-​voting as opposed to the more common
system of consensus-​based decision-​making (Biermann et al. 2012). Yet earth system
governance is not only about strengthening global institutions, which are merely part
of the entire effort. Notably, technological change and incremental policies at local and
national levels will also remain a driving force of progress in earth system governance, as
 Global Governance in the “Anthropocene”    477

will transformations in social behaviour, moving from a focus on mere cooperation and
efficiency to broader notions of “sufficiency” (Princen 2005).
In sum, in the course of the twenty-​first century the Anthropocene is likely to change
the way we understand political systems both analytically and normatively, from vil-
lage level up to the United Nations. This also makes the Anthropocene one of the most
demanding, and most interesting, research topics for the field of IPT, which has to assist
in developing novel, more effective, and more equitable governance systems to cope
with the growing challenges of earth system transformation.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank students and colleagues at Cornell University,
Binghamton University, and Justitia Amplificata as well as Peter Stone, Judith
Lichtenberg, Aaron James, and Gillian Brock for helpful comments on previous ver-
sions of this paper.

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 Pa rt V I I

E T H IC S A N D
I N T E R NAT IONA L
P U B L IC P OL IC Y
 ­c hapter 36

International P ol i t i c a l
Theory M e ets
Internationa l P u bl i c
P olic y

Christian Barry

How should International Political Theory (IPT) relate to public policy? Should the-
orists aspire for their work to be policy-​relevant and, if so, in what sense? When can we
legitimately criticize a theory for failing to be relevant to practice?
To develop a response to these questions, I will consider two issues: (1) the extent to
which international political theorists should be concerned that the norms they articu-
late are precise enough to entail clear practical advice under different empirical circum-
stances; (2) whether they should provide concrete practical advice on policy choice and
institutional reform. These questions are related but distinct, and we should answer each
quite differently. Regarding the first, I shall argue that it counts heavily against a theory if
it is not precise enough to guide policy and reform given certain empirical assumptions.
On the second, I will argue that theorists should be very cautious when engaging with
questions of policy and institutional design. Some principles of IPT can be criticized
for being insufficiently precise, but a degree of abstraction from concrete policy recom-
mendations is a virtue, rather than a vice, of an element of IPT.
I conclude that we should aim to be precise without being concrete. To help fix ideas
and anchor my argument, I will discuss these issues with reference to a principle that
John Rawls has advocated in his influential work The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999a): a
duty of assistance to societies that lack the capacity to satisfy the basic needs or protect
the basic rights of their people.

How Practical Should IPT Be?

IPT has two central substantive aims. The first is to articulate and justify norms that
should regulate the conduct of collective agents with international reach—​ states,
482   Christian Barry

non-​governmental organizations, private enterprises. These include principles regulat-

ing the use of force, economic statecraft, and so on. The second is to articulate and justify
norms that should inform the design and reform of social arrangements—​including the
institution of the sovereign state itself, supranational institutions such as the EU, and
international law. These include principles evaluating property rights, sovereign pre-
rogatives, rules of trade, and so on.
These two sets of norms are clearly interconnected, and both are usually under-
stood to provide us with means of comparing and assessing different policies and social
arrangements that we might now consider adopting or bringing about. Although I have
stated the aims of IPT in normative terms—​as principles regarding how states and other
agents ought to or may act, and how institutions may or may not be designed—​they
clearly also possess an evaluative component. That is, they provide criteria by which we
can make claims about whether one state’s behaviour is better or worse than another
state’s, or how its behaviour might have been better, and whether some proposed reform
of social institutions would make them more or less just.
How practical should IPT be? One view is that political theorists should not really
seek to intervene in contemporary politics, or at least in policy discussions, at all.
This might draw support from two approaches to political theory that differ from one
another quite radically in just about every other respect. The first would be an extreme
form of idealism. On this approach, the aim of IPT is to articulate a concrete vision of
an ideal global order. Such an order is no doubt likely to differ quite dramatically from
our present one. Indeed, it may seem infeasible, not only because it cannot be brought
about from the non-​ideal circumstances of the present, but because it could not plaus-
ibly be brought about and sustained (given what we know about the capacities of ordin-
ary human agents, unavoidable scarcity of resources, and so on). Political theory, on this
approach, should not generally be concerned with the details of real-​world politics or
the policies that might be implemented in the real world. For one thing, human agents
and their institutions may fall so far short of what they would be in an ideal order that
reflecting on such ideals may tell us very little about the choices we confront in policy-​
making and institutional design.
The second approach would be an extreme form of realism. On this approach,
attempting to use political ideals to inform public policy invites folly. Policies that are
endorsed because they would better satisfy some normative ideal are likely to do more
harm than good. Theories are likely to be based on unrealistic assumptions about the
motivational capacities of ordinary human agents, we are warned, and to ignore the real
practical constraints regarding what can be feasibly achieved in politics. Robert Goodin
(who does not endorse this charge) outlines the argument:

fixation upon unobtainable ideals engenders unrealistic aspirations and expect-

ations, making even the best possible government and policies seem simply not good
enough. It encourages dogmatism and discourages flexibility. It makes the best the
enemy of the good. It encourages us to “do good though the heavens may fall”, rather
than contenting ourselves with doing as much good as we can without the heavens
falling. (Goodin 1995: 37)
 IPT Meets International Public Policy    483

In sum, actively pursuing ideals in politics may even undermine rather than promote
them (see also Galston 2010).
Very few who are drawn to IPT find the kinds of extreme idealism or extreme real-
ism sketched above to be particularly attractive. While there may be an important place
in IPT for the conception of ideal global orders, however unobtainable they may be,
surely this should not exhaust it (see Chapter 47). And we should surely hope that our
ideals might give us some guidance in dealing with contemporary politics, even if we
recognize that we will fall far short of them. Indeed, the more radically divorced a polit-
ical theory becomes from what might, somewhere somehow, be practically possible for
creatures like us, the less it seems to be a theory for us. Furthermore, even if the range of
feasible alternatives to present policies and institutions is more limited than one might
initially think or hope, it does not follow that extreme realism accurately represents the
range of possibilities for change and reform.
In any case, most international political theorists would not consider their work to be
of value if it could not connect in some meaningful way with contemporary debates—​
they want their work to have some practical role, and the belief that it might play such a
role is (at least in part) what motivates them (see Chapter 29). This chapter is directed at
those who endorse these goals. It explores how theorists might best develop work that
is at once practically relevant and responsive to the empirical complexities involved in
shaping policies and institutional arrangements in the real world.

An Example: Rawls’s Duty of Assistance

In The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999a), John Rawls articulated a picture of what social
arrangements we should aim to bring about at the global level. They should take the
form of a “Society of Peoples.” Such a society would be composed of peoples that have a
certain character, namely that they are “well-​ordered.” Two types of peoples can be well-​
ordered, in Rawls’s sense. First are reasonable liberal peoples, which stably protect the
basic liberties of all citizens, provide them with adequate means to exercise these liber-
ties, and subject their laws and policies to democratic control (Rawls 1999a: 4). Second
are what he calls “decent hierarchical peoples.” Decent hierarchical peoples may fail to
protect some basic liberties and may not possess a democratic character (and are thus
unjust by liberal standards), but they nevertheless stably protect a core list of human
rights (including subsistence rights), and incorporate processes for determining pol-
icies and laws that are consultative and thus responsive in some manner to the wishes of
their people (pp. 63, 66).
Both decent and liberal peoples are, in addition, non-​aggressive in their relations
with other peoples. Each of these well-​ordered societies should, on Rawls’s view, inter-
act with all others in accordance with eight principles, “The Law of Peoples” (see Rawls
1999a: 37). The Law of Peoples incorporates principles for dealing with peoples that are
not well-​ordered, and thus do not have a proper place within the Society of Peoples,
484   Christian Barry

including aggressive and dangerous “outlaw states,” that undermine peace and fail to
protect the human rights of their citizens (p. 81), and “burdened societies,” whose cir-
cumstances are such that they lack the requisite capacities to sustain a well-​ordered
regime, whether liberal or non-​liberal but decent (p. 106).
Rawls clearly intends his view in the Law of Peoples to be practical, in the sense that
reflection on the ideal of a society of peoples and the law of peoples that governs their
interactions bears on how we, who do not live in a society of peoples, should evaluate
the options open to us. In particular, these ideals provide means by which we might
judge progress towards it. Elsewhere, Rawls defines the goal of his theory as “prob-
ing the limits of practicable political possibility” (Rawls 2001: 4–​5). Of course, what
is a practical possibility may be very far from being realized, which makes his ambi-
tion utopian. “By showing how the social world may realize the features of a realistic
utopia,” he writes, “political philosophy provides a long-​term goal of political endeavor,
and in working toward it gives meaning to what we can do today” (Rawls 1999a: 128).
Although he recognizes that ideals like the society of peoples may be difficult to real-
ize, such ideals provide (he argues elsewhere) “the only basis for the systematic grasp
of [the] more pressing problems” that we must confront in non-​ideal circumstances
(Rawls 1999b: 8).
Some contemporary societies, at least, seem to meet Rawls’s criteria for being rea-
sonable liberal societies, outlaw societies, or burdened societies, even if societies may
not fit neatly into any of these categories (whether or not there are any existing decent
hierarchical societies is a somewhat more difficult question). It would not be going too
far to suggest that an incipient society of peoples already exists that regulates its con-
duct, however imperfectly, by principles similar to some of those adumbrated in the Law
of Peoples, and that this might be extended and deepened over time. This is no acci-
dent, since many of the principles spelled out in the Law of Peoples are relatively familiar
ones. Some interpreters have viewed this as essential to Rawls’s aims—​he wants to draw
on norms that are already largely part of the global political culture to engage critically
with current practices (Wenar 2006).
To see whether it succeeds in this practical aim, let’s focus in particular on the eighth
and final principle of Rawls’s Law of Peoples: “Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples
living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political
and social regime” (Rawls 1999a: 37). Many theorists of global justice were disappointed
with this duty of assistance (which I’ll refer to as the DA) on substantive grounds. Why,
they asked, should we not instead employ a more far-​reaching principle of distributive
justice at the global level, such as Rawls insisted we must adopt at the domestic level
(Moellendorf 2002; Tan 2004; Caney 2005)? Was this principle not unduly conservative,
permitting unacceptable levels of international inequality (Pogge 2004)? Others rushed
to Rawls’s defence, arguing that important differences between the global and domestic
spheres make principles of egalitarian justice applicable domestically, but not globally
(Reidy 2004; 2007; Freeman 2007). Here, however, I will put this important debate to
one side. Instead, I will consider whether the DA succeeds as a practical principle.
 IPT Meets International Public Policy    485

The Content of Duties to Assistance

Rawls introduces his DA as an “especially controversial” principle (Rawls 1999a: 37,

n. 43). He claims that, unlike the seven other principles constituting his Law of Peoples,
it is unfamiliar, not drawn from “the history and usages of international law and prac-
tice” (Rawls 1999a: 41, 57). It did not appear in his initial presentation of the idea of a Law
of Peoples in earlier work (Rawls 1993: 55). To understand the content of the DA, we need
to know who possesses the duty and to whom the duty is owed. On these points, Rawls
is clear: the duty binds all well-​ordered societies within the Society of Peoples, and it
is owed to all burdened societies. As he describes them, burdened societies “lack the
political cultural traditions, the human capital and know-​how, and often, the material
and technological resources to be well-​ordered” (Rawls 1999a: 106). What distinguishes
them from outlaw states is that, to the extent that their people are poor or their basic
rights are ill-​protected, this is a result not of their unwillingness to achieve these ends,
but of their incapacity. Even societies that do not actively cause rights violations through
the agency of the state, but which fail to prevent them when they can, seem to qualify as
outlaw states, rather than burdened societies (Rawls 1999a: 109).
The aim of the DA therefore is to enable burdened societies to become well-​ordered.
This requires at a minimum that the human rights and basic needs of their members are
satisfied.1 Once that long-​term target is reached, a cut-​off point comes into operation so
that no further assistance is owed to each formerly burdened society (Rawls 1999a: 111,
118–​19). This threshold may be reached even though “the now well-​ordered society may
still be relatively poor” (p. 111), causing many critics to argue that the DA did not go
far enough, since it allowed seemingly unlimited international economic inequalities
so long as all societies were well-​ordered (Beitz 2000; Pogge 2004). They questioned
whether Rawls had the resource within his own theory to justify such a sharp distinction
between the principles that applied domestically and globally (Pogge 2006). And more
sympathetic critics embrace the idea of the cut-​off, but claim that its target is too unam-
bitious (Tasioulas 2005). But these issues, too, can be set aside, since they relate to the
content, rather than the practical applicability, of the DA.
Rawls makes several other remarks about the DA which help us to determine its
meaning. Importantly, he limits the degree to which assistance to burdened societies
can be made conditional on their adopting particular institutional forms. More spe-
cifically, he does not regard it as permissible to make such assistance depend on their
transitioning to just (i.e. reasonable liberal) societies. Rather, equal assistance must be
provided to those societies progressing towards becoming decent hierarchical peoples.
Aside from such assistance being made conditional on actually helping societies protect
basic human rights and satisfy basic needs, it is owed unconditionally to all burdened
societies. Rawls does not regard the causes of their having become or remaining bur-
dened to be relevant to the duty to assist them (Rawls 1999a: 108). Even when a society
is burdened due to factors such as “the political culture, the political virtues and civic
486   Christian Barry

society of the country, its members’ probity and industriousness, [and] their capacity for
innovation,” he writes, “the duty of assistance is in no way diminished.”2

Concreteness
We might complain that a principle such as the DA is insufficiently concrete in the
advice that it might provide to policy-​makers who want to bring the foreign policies
of their society into line with its requirements. Rawls goes no further than to note that
such assistance can take plural forms, including technical cooperation and the integra-
tion of burdened societies into global networks of cooperation (Rawls 1999a: 108–9).
For example, would Rawls’s DA require that affluent countries significantly increase
their aid to poorer societies? What policies on trade and immigration would it imply
for existing well-​ordered states? Other IPT theorists who have considered questions of
assistance and distributive justice have gone a good bit further than Rawls. They have
proposed specific targets for the amount of resources that should be transferred to what
Rawls would regard as burdened societies, as well as suggesting a host of institutional
reforms at the global level.
It is easy to see why those discussing assistance-​based responsibilities have focused
on financial transfers, and might hope for a duty of assistance to be specified in these
terms—​there is clear appeal in the idea of simply providing money in a way that dir-
ectly helps other societies. And, prima facie, a case for direct financial assistance as a
means of acting on a duty to assist is relatively straightforward. Financial aid promises
to relax the budget constraints of the countries that receive it, thereby enabling them to
pursue investments designed to improve the wellbeing of their people. Providing aid to
governments should serve an important role in the sound management of their affairs,
and thus also their ability to reduce the poverty of their people. Aid might enable other-
wise burdened societies to maintain their spending during periods of revenue short-
fall. Infusions of foreign currency might smooth international transactions over time
and thus help to limit short-​term volatility in the exchange rate. Governments can also
employ resources made available through aid for longer-​term projects, such as improve-
ments in infrastructure, education, and health care, without imposing the burden of
financing them solely on present and future taxpayers.
However, one major challenge to any duty of assistance that specifies some level of
direct financial provision is the risk that financial assistance will make no positive differ-
ence to the lives of those living in burdened societies and, disturbingly, may even worsen
their living conditions. Two concerns can be distinguished. The first is that financial
transfers may prove futile—​they will be essentially wasted and will fail to achieve the
objectives for which they are intended. The second worry is that transfers may prove
counterproductive, undermining the very purposes they are intended to achieve. It has
been argued that direct financial transfers may inhibit development in a range of ways,
for instance by creating a dependency mentality and overwhelming the management
capacity of governments (Kanbur 2000); by crowding out private-​sector development
 IPT Meets International Public Policy    487

(Bauer 1976); by worsening bureaucratic quality and weakening governance or by

undermining competitiveness through Dutch Disease effects (Rajan and Subramanian
2005; 2007). If these concerns are well-​founded, societies will not be well placed to know
whether or not they should indeed provide financial support to burdened societies or
instead explore other means of helping them. Keith Horton calls this the “Epistemic
Problem” of aid (2010).
Some political theorists are much more confident when they pronounce on the effects
of aid, and continue to formulate duties of assistance explicitly in terms of levels of finan-
cial provision. Singer, for example, considers that “[t]‌he worst that can be said with any
certainty is that in the past, a lot of official aid has been misconceived and misdirected
and has done little good” (Singer 2009: 121). Experts familiar with the literature on aid
will find such assessments to be overly sanguine. This is not to say that the case against
discharging duties to assist through direct financial provision is sound either. Rather,
it is to point out that a great deal of care needs to be taken in making claims about the
effectiveness of aid in relieving poverty. To quote two leading contributors to this litera-
ture: “the debate about aid effectiveness is one where little is settled” (Rajan 2005: 54)
and “[t]he empirical literature on aid effectiveness has yielded unclear and ambiguous
results” (Bourguignon and Sundberg 2007: 316; see Chapter 41). What we see in looking
closely at this debate, as well as discussion of other measures that might be adopted to
promote development, is a great deal of expert disagreement.
What position is it reasonable for political theorists to take on matters such as this,
where there is expert disagreement? They themselves, of course, are not experts even
if they are more conversant with the empirical literature than an ordinary lay person.
There is a tendency, when confronted with such disagreement, just to cite and draw on
the work of those experts who support what we believe (or hope) to be true. But it is
far from clear that this is a responsible epistemic attitude for political theorists to take.
When it comes to measures that would be effective in assisting burdened societies, what
is notable is not merely the fact of disagreement among those who study the effects of
interventions to promote development, but that there do not seem to be clear majority
or minority views. Are there heuristics we should adopt?
Elizabeth Anderson has sensibly suggested that we can ordinarily exercise “second-​
order capacity to judge trustworthiness and consensus, and access to the informa-
tion needed to make such judgments” when we encounter expert disagreement about
technical policy questions (Anderson 2011: 145). That is, we can identify differences
in “credentials, honesty, and epistemic responsibility” of those asserting expertise in
some domain. However, it is not clear that the experts on one or the other side of dis-
agreements on topics relating to economic development and poverty relief fall foul of
the criteria Anderson identifies. The case is arguably quite different from (for example)
the science surrounding climate change, where an overwhelming majority of scien-
tists affirm that human activities have contributed substantially to it, even if they argue
heatedly about the details. In the climate case, we are faced not with genuine expert dis-
agreement, but with expert and fraudulent arguments, where we need principle to help
us distinguish which is which. But that will not always be the case (see Lane 2014). To be
488   Christian Barry

sure, it is good to maintain a healthy suspicion of expert opinion (see Buchanan 2002),
but that is not the same as disregarding it or simply cherry-​picking from it.
For these reasons, it is generally a mistake for political theorists to formulate their
principles in very concrete terms that are linked to particular policy proposals, since
doing so will involve making strong assumptions about what are, typically, contested
questions of empirical fact. Political theory needs to be conjoined with evidence-​based
empirical assessment if it is to yield plausible policy directives.
Precisely because interest in IPT is motivated by an interest in the practice of real-​
world politics, there is a risk that the practical implications of some theory will be too
readily assumed, or argued on an inadequate base of evidence. IPT is replete with ambi-
tious proposals for reforms of policies and institutional arrangements. Yet international
political theorists are often poorly equipped to engage with the complex empirical ques-
tions that lie at the heart of questions concerning institutional reform and policy. So it is
a virtue, rather than a vice, of a principle like the DA that it is not formulated concretely.
This makes it flexible, and not dependent on any particular and contested view of which
policies and arrangements best advance the aim of helping burdened societies.
It is worth pointing out that, as a whole, Rawls’s IPT might nevertheless be more
concrete than would be desirable, and that it therefore makes unwarranted empirical
assumptions. Rawls’s theory takes as a given that the world is divided into peoples,
and that these peoples possess territorial sovereignty and much the same powers and
prerogatives as modern states. Many have questioned, however, whether global just-
ice might not be better achieved by moving away from this sort of Westphalian order;
and have pointed out that it has already been eroded in some respects by processes of
increased political and economic integration (Buchanan 2000; Valentini 2011).
While Rawls may perhaps be correct that his ideal of a Society of Peoples is the best we
might reasonably hope for, shouldn’t we at least leave open the possibility that alterna-
tive social arrangements might fare better? His domestic theory of justice does not, after
all, specify some particular institutional form that a society should take (it could favour
a property-​owning democracy or some form of market socialism, for instance), but
rather identifies principles that can be used to make comparative assessments of various
such forms. Why, critics have reasonably asked, should his theory of global affairs not
also be formulated more abstractly, rather than being wedded to the institutional form
of the modern state from the beginning (Pogge 2006)? This is consistent with main-
taining, as many of Rawls’s more sympathetic readers have done, that the proposals for
a more cosmopolitan global order in which the significance of the state is diminished
would be infeasible or undesirable (Meckled-​Garcia 2008; Risse 2012).

Precision
We might also complain that the DA is not sufficiently precise. A principle is not suf-
ficiently precise if it is articulated in a way that does not lead us to draw out its prac-
tical implications, even on the assumption that certain empirical conditions hold. While
 IPT Meets International Public Policy    489

admittedly not a concrete principle, the DA could nevertheless be quite precise. It would
direct well-​ordered societies to adopt particular policies towards burdened societies, so
long as certain empirical circumstances hold, without being formulated on the assump-
tion that any particular conditions exist. Precision is not an all-​or-​nothing affair: prin-
ciples can be more or less precise. The more precise a principle governing some domain,
the more it narrows the range of permissible policies that can be adopted in that domain,
assuming that certain empirical circumstances hold.
For instance, a principle that states we should always choose policies (among feasible
alternatives) that raise the income levels of the bottom-​income decile is more precise
than a principle that states we should always choose policies that give somewhat more
weight to increasing the income levels of the bottom-​income decile than to increasing
the income of groups in other deciles. Note that greater precision would not entail par-
ticular policy recommendations. It could instead indicate when some decision proced-
ure should be used to determine policy: for example, when experts disagree as to which
of a range of policies would best promote some social objective. An element of proced-
ural justice, then, can be incorporated into the framing of a principle.
Insofar as theories aim to be practical, precision is a virtue. But it is also obviously not
the only virtue, and many very precise principles will be less plausible than somewhat
less precise ones. What then might it mean to criticize a theory for being too impre-
cise? There is probably no good general answer to this question. One pragmatic way
of responding is that, once a principle within some domain reaches a certain level of
imprecision, it becomes so indeterminate that it becomes difficult to compare it to com-
peting principles. Indeed, its very meaning becomes unclear.
To explore the extent to which the DA is precise, let us consider the different ways
in which duty of assistance might be understood. Precisely specifying a duty to assist
requires identifying the duty-​bearer, whom the duty is owed to, what it aims to achieve,
and how stringent it is. As noted, Rawls is quite clear about the duty-​bearer (well-​
ordered societies), whom it is owed to (burdened societies), and its aims (to facilitate
the transition of societies from a burdened status to becoming well-​ordered). But how
stringent is the duty?
A society’s duty to assist is stringent, in the sense in which I shall use the term, to
the extent that it (1) constrains the society and (2) can demand much of it. The duty
to assist constrains a society to the extent that it cannot justify refusing to assist bur-
dened societies by appealing to the costs to itself of doing so, or to other valuable ends
that its conduct could instead bring about if it does not do so.3 When, if ever, can
well-​ordered societies claim to have done all that is required of them by the DA, inso-
far as not all burdened societies have become well-​ordered? Note that duties can vary
widely in terms of their stringency. To illustrate with a traditional example, the duties
of individuals to refrain from breaking the limbs of innocent non-​threatening people
are ordinarily thought to be very constraining—​the costs they would have to appeal
to or the good they would thereby achieve would have to be very large for their con-
duct to be excusable or justifiable—​whereas the duties to refrain from being impolite
are not.
490   Christian Barry

Philosophers who have considered duties to assist have tended to focus on how they
apply to individual persons. And they have defended duties of differing stringency.
Consider, for example, the duty of assistance defended by Peter Singer: “if it is in our
power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything
of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (Singer 1972: 231). This
duty of assistance is very stringent indeed. By “without sacrificing anything of compar-
able moral importance,” Singer means “without causing anything else comparably bad
to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral
good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent” (p. 231). Your life,
and perhaps some other very serious harm, is pretty much the only cost that could be
deemed comparable to the death of a child, impartially considered.
We could imagine an analogue of this principle at the level of societies. Placed in the
Rawlsian context, it could demand that well-​ordered societies make sacrifices to assist
burdened societies up to the point where they would be sacrificing something of com-
parable moral importance. What would count as being of comparable moral import-
ance? Presumably it would be of comparable importance if the societies were to cease
to be well-​ordered, but it is not clear what else would reach this bar. Indeed, it might
even require that reasonable liberal peoples, which hold themselves to a higher stand-
ard, risk becoming decent societies should this be required as a means of bringing bur-
dened societies into the society of peoples. Rawls insists that, while we should not be
concerned with distributive equality globally, we have a duty to ensure that all burdened
societies become well-​ordered. The question we are considering is how this goal fits with
concern for objectives like domestic egalitarian justice, which require far more than that
all citizens have a decent standard of living.
Others who have endorsed stringent duties to assist in general have neverthe-
less thought that these duties can become much less stringent in conditions of non-​
compliance. Liam Murphy, for example, has argued that stringent duties to assist impose
their demands unfairly in situations of partial compliance. If an agent is complying with
a stringent principle of assistance like Singer’s while others are not, she has not only to
do her own fair share but also to take on as much as she can of the shares of the non-​
complying others. Full compliance with a stringent principle like Singer’s might mean
that few actually need to make very large sacrifices at all, given that smaller efforts might
suffice if all make them. But in the case where there is a great deal of non-​compliance
with this principle, some agents might have to make very large sacrifices. On Murphy’s
account this would be unfair.
To avoid giving rise to such unfairness, Murphy argues that moralities should incorp-
orate a “compliance condition”: “the demands on a complying person should not
exceed what they would be under full compliance with the principle” (Murphy 2000: 7).
According to Murphy, “what matters are the effects on people’s well-​being of compliance
with the agent-​neutral principle; this is what needs to be fairly distributed” (Murphy
2000: 90). David Miller (2011: 239–40) has recently offered a further defence of this sort
of position: “by doing my fair share I have discharged my obligation, and the injustice
that remains, because of partial compliance, is the responsibility of the non‐compliers,
 IPT Meets International Public Policy    491

and only theirs.” Here, too, an analogue might be endorsed at the societal level. Such
a condition could be placed, similarly, on societies. The DA might be interpreted to
require that each well-​ordered society does only its fair share (as stipulated in the com-
pliance condition) to enable burdened societies to become decent or liberal.
Others have endorsed much less stringent interpretations of the duty to assist. T. M.
Scanlon (1998: 224), for example, endorses the following principle:

If you are presented with a situation in which you can prevent something very bad
from happening, or alleviate someone’s dire plight, by making only a slight (or even
moderate) sacrifice, then it would be wrong not to do so.

And one could imagine an analogue of this type of principle operating at the societal
level. In that case, a reasonable liberal society would have to make some slight or mod-
erate sacrifice to help burdened societies transition towards becoming decent or rea-
sonable liberal peoples. While it is not perhaps obvious what should count as a slight
or moderate sacrifice for a society to make, it would nevertheless provide a rough and
ready way of assessing whether well-​ordered societies are fulfilling their duty to assist.
So which of these quite different ways of understanding the DA is what Rawls has
in mind? Is the DA a very stringent principle, requiring quite large sacrifices to assist
burdened societies, or a much less stringent one? Does it incorporate a compliance con-
dition, or some comparable principle for limiting the sacrifices well-​ordered societies
make to their “fair share,” or not? Strikingly, the text of the Law of Peoples really offers us
no clue whatsoever on these critical questions. At no point in this work does Rawls indi-
cate the extent to which members of good standing within the Law of Peoples should
make sacrifices to assist burdened societies. It has a clear cut-​off and target point in the
sense that we know when a society achieves a status such that other well-​ordered soci-
eties owe a duty of assistance to it, but very little clarity about when a well-​ordered soci-
ety will have done enough, or its fair share, to help societies that remain burdened. One
of Rawls’s most sympathetic commentators interprets his view thus:

wealthy states are obligated to discharge their duties of assistance prior to commit-
ting themselves to national projects such as space exploration or artistic achievement
or continued growth in per capita (Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) for the sake of
increased material comfort or consumer luxury. This is still a position weaker than
that defended by Peter Singer in his famous essay on famine, affluence and morality.
(Reidy 2007: 199)

The DA, thus expounded, is rather spectacularly imprecise. It leaves open whether it
would require that societies not fund the arts, improve their highway systems, or miti-
gate inequalities in educational achievement when the resources devoted to further-
ing these objectives would enable moving some burdened societies marginally closer
to becoming well-​ordered.4 But even Reidy’s interpretation of Rawls’s claim is far more
precise than anything Rawls explicitly affirms. He does not rule out that the DA could
demand sacrifices at the societal level that are on a par with those that Singer’s principle
492   Christian Barry

would demand of individuals. This is puzzling, and concerning. It is puzzling because,

as we have seen, one could interpret the DA in a way that would require very radical
changes to the behaviour of well-​ordered states, or on the contrary view states as fulfill-
ing their duties when they make very small sacrifices to help burdened societies.
When people have criticized Rawls’s IPT for being too conservative, they have tended
to focus on the fact that it does not incorporate a principle to regulate global inequal-
ity. But our discussion of the possible ways of specifying the DA suggest that we cannot
really assess how conservative or radical his doctrine is. If it demands that well-​ordered
societies reduce themselves to a very low standard of living when this is required to
assist burdened societies, it is very radical, quite apart from whether it permits inequal-
ities. This lack of precision leaves unclear which of a state’s own domestic expenditures
on its own citizens or policies it might adopt when interacting with others that should
count as consistent with justice or not. It is hard to judge whether the DA succeeds in
Rawls’s aim of exploring the limits of practical possibility.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I’ve contrasted two different ways in which an IPT might aspire to be
practical. It might be concrete—​spelling out specific policy requirements—​or it might
be precise—​giving practical advice conditional on certain empirical assumptions hold-
ing. I’ve argued that IPT should avoid concreteness, given epistemic limitations, but
embrace precision.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Chris Armstrong, Chris Brown, Robyn Eckersley, Katie Steele, and
Laura Valentini for comments on an earlier version of this essay. I also gratefully
acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council.

Notes
1. Controversially, Rawls’s conception of human rights is somewhat truncated, and excludes
many liberal rights that have appeared on lists of human rights in international law. For dis-
cussion, see Tasioulas (2005).
2. As Chris Armstrong (2009) notes, some of Rawls’s interpreters have failed to recognize this
important feature.
3. The terminology here is developed in Barry and Øverland (2016). On the idea of the appeal
to cost, see Kagan (1991) and Haydar (2009).
4. Reidy (2007: 200, n. 13) himself seems to acknowledge this, noting that it is not clear
whether Rawls’s DA would require that well-​ordered societies sacrifice democratic or lib-
eral welfare rights to assist burdened societies.
 IPT Meets International Public Policy    493

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 ­c hapter 37

Et hical Foreig n P ol i c y i n
a Multip ol a r Worl d

Tim Dunne

A striking feature of writings on International Relations (IR) over the last three dec-
ades is the burgeoning interest in applying insights grounded in normative theory to
the practice of foreign policy. This is not to say that foreign policy was devoid of theor-
etical and normative reasoning prior to the end of the Cold War—​far from it: foreign
policy has always been “for someone and for some purpose,” to use Robert Cox’s often-​
cited remark. To simply ask the who/​what question is to reveal a saturation of implicit
and explicit claims about communities and peoples—​what they own, what they covet,
who their friends and rivals are, what memories and experiences shape and frame their
expectations, how resources are distributed between classes and peoples, and what
aspirations communities have about their future.
This saturation of theoretical and normative reasoning is evident in the doctrinal
statements periodically issued by great powers (Wohlforth 2016). Take, for example,
George Kennan’s famous “long telegram” that reset US foreign policy in the post-​1945
period. Initially, the US State Department was positive towards the Soviet Union given
that they had been such an important ally in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Kennan’s
response was to warn of the threat that communism posed in light of its expansion-
ist logic—​a prescription that provided the underpinnings of the strategy of contain-
ment pursued for much of the Cold War. Towards the end of the diplomatic cable,
Kennan (1946) embeds his realist account in a strongly moralist reading of the relation-
ship between the domestic politic and foreign policy: “Every courageous and incisive
measure,” he wrote, “to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-​
confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic
victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués.”
So the formulation of foreign policy has always been shaped by political ideas and
values—​and the contestation around the validity of those doctrines has equally drawn
on other competing ideas and values. Yet, despite this mutual interdependence in
the practice of politics, ethics and foreign policy have had a troubled history in the
496   Tim Dunne

discipline of IR. As I discuss in the first section, the sources of this estrangement are
many and complex. To begin with, a plurality of moral codes evolve out of particular
cultural and historical traditions. In their pioneering collection of essays on ethical
traditions, Terry Nardin and David Mapel (1992) identify at least twelve languages of
moral debate. Forms of moral reasoning cut across these diverse languages, with some
privileging consequentialist patterns of thought and action and others tending towards
deontological reasoning: a realist (consequentialist) and a pacifist (de-​ontological) may
both agree that passivity in the face of provocation is the preferable path—​although the
reasons each gives for how she or he arrived at this position would be mutually unin-
telligible. The inference here is that we immediately encounter a hermeneutic dilemma
in understanding ethics and foreign policy: in applying ethical principles to particular
situations, practitioners encounter situational impediments which often compromise
the purity of the principle(s) in question; and, relatedly, practitioners in ministries of
state, or CEOs of non-​governmental organizations for that matter, are rarely trained in
theology or philosophy, and thus the doctrines they draw upon are often poorly under-
stood and inconsistently applied.
A further complication is whether moral standards should be understood as
aspirations—​something that we should all strive to reach—​or whether they are so
embedded in the everyday world of politics that it is impossible to treat ethics as a dis-
crete “dimension” (as politicians frequently describe the relationship between ethics
and the pursuit of other goals). As I argue in the second section, an upside with treating
ethics as a standard is that the scholar or activist can evaluate political conduct in rela-
tion to a normative goal an actor has set for themselves or, perhaps more importantly,
has been forged in and through dialogue and consensus. It follows that if ethics is under-
stood as a standard that is external to the decision-​maker, we are then able to judge the
conduct of foreign policy practitioners not in terms of the purity of their reasoning or
judgement but rather in terms of the acceptability of their conduct relative to standards
set by the relevant political community. This does not mean that those standards or rules
must always be followed, only that when they are not, the relevant actor or institution
provides an adequate justification for why this would not have been the right thing to do
in the circumstances.
When thinking about ethics as embodying standards that must be upheld, we quickly
encounter the thorny question as to whether collective actors such as states and institu-
tions should be thought of as having rights and duties in the way that we routinely speak
about individuals in civil society. Again, different ethical traditions will provide alter-
native accounts of whether states are capable of being rights-​holders and duty-​bearers.
Even if one is cautious about the claim that states are “like people” when it comes to
making commitments or taking decisions, it has long been established that officers of
the state are responsible for their actions. The Nuremberg trials held in 1945–​6 char-
acterized certain actions as being in violation of the law of nations, for which violators
bore international criminal responsibility. The obligation not to commit crimes against
humanity notably widened the idea of international responsibilities away from an earlier
presumption that it applied solely to combatants: civilians could also be war criminals.
 Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World    497

The development of law and norms in relation to the idea of common human-
ity is a striking feature of the contemporary global order. Many scholars engaged in
debates about the content and application of ethics to foreign policy have been drawn
to “humanitarianism” for both normative and analytical reasons (see Chapter 22).
Normatively, humanitarianism is undergirded by the simple but widely held view that
all people are of equal moral worth regardless of geography, class, gender, race, and reli-
gion. Analytically, the international humanitarian order rests on a sometimes implicit
claim that there has been a transformation in the basic category of political authority in
world politics. If there is now a consensus that the moral purpose of international soci-
ety now includes efforts to protect “those in peril” and prevent unnecessary harm, then
the case can be made that international order has been either modified or transformed
beyond earlier conceptions of Westphalian sovereignty (Barnett 2011: 1).
The reason for foregrounding human rights in this chapter is explained in part because
it is a good illustration of how of ethics and foreign policy are configured in practice.
Other cases that could have been featured, such as the responsibility that falls on gov-
ernments and peoples to end or alleviate world poverty (Tan 2010) (see Chapters 9 and
27). Not only is human rights a good illustrative case for intrinsic reasons, it is also the
case that the practitioners featured in the chapter all converged on “rights talk” in their
particular variants of internationalism.
In the conclusion, I consider the resilience of the liberal internationalist conception
of ethics and foreign policy given two related trends: first, the retreat of the European
Union and the United States from the assertive internationalism that marked their
foreign policies during the post-​1990 period; and second, the challenge that develop-
ing countries and rising powers pose to doctrines and mandates which undermine
their sovereign right to determine the rules and values which govern their political
community.

Ethics and Foreign Policy: Awkward

Partners?

Before delving deeper into the relationship between ethics and foreign policy, it is
important to settle on a definition of what we mean by foreign policy. The most inclu-
sive conception is offered by Christopher Hill. He defines foreign policy as “the sum
of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually a state) in
international relations” (Smith, Hadfield, and Dunne 2016: 3). As the quotation from
Kennan illustrated, these external relations are made possible by prior moral values and
beliefs, while at the same time being mechanisms by which these values are defended or
extended.
Given the interplay that has always existed between ethics and politics, it would be
reasonable to assume that ethics have been at the forefront of thinking about foreign
498   Tim Dunne

policy. They have not. For much of the brief history of IR, foreign policy has either
consciously or subconsciously marginalized ethical reasoning. Consider, briefly, two
explanations for this awkward partnership.

The Discipline of IR: Seeing like a State

As a first cut, consider the objections of some variants of realism to considerations of
ethics. In a strictly Hobbesian view of the system of states—​being one in which war
and conflict is the regular case—​the only foreign policy worth pursuing is one where
survival is the “end” and self-​interest is the “means.” In the same vein, modern realists
such as E. H. Carr referred to the idealists of the interwar period as “wishful thinkers,”
abstract moralists who were sleepwalking their way into another total war. Many would
argue that Carr’s position on ethics in The Twenty Years’ Crisis was more sophisticated
than earlier accounts implied, seeing realism and utopianism as two logics that inter-
act in a complex and contingent manner (Booth 1991). Whatever the “right” reading
of Carr, his initial reception became a justification for the primacy of pursuing narrow
national security interests ahead of lofty (and often hypocritical) claims to be promoting
international morality.
If the so-​called “first great debate” provided one set of reasons for the marginalization
of the study of ethics in foreign policy, the “second great debate” gave another. As the
discipline of IR evolved in the 1960s, albeit slowly and confined mainly to a dozen or so
leading universities in the UK and the USA, it developed a momentum towards a scien-
tific approach to policy and practice. The story about how IR underwent a behavioural
revolution in the 1960s has been told many times (Knorr and Rosenau 1969; Holsti 1991;
Hollis and Smith 1990), and there is no need to rehearse these arguments here. Suffice
to say that the elusive quest to generate empirical laws about how and why states behave
has effectively marginalized consideration of ethics in the formulation of foreign pol-
icy. By the 1970s, in the American heartland of the emerging discipline, a new gener-
ation of social scientists used game theory to understand the conditions under which
states would cooperate or defect. In this methodology, there was no place for classical
questions about how leaders ought to act or where their value preferences came from.
Drawing on a different form of scientific method, Kenneth Waltz (1979) closed out the
decade with a powerful claim that the international was a discrete realm with its own
causal logic. The system was so dominant that it conveyed foreign-​policy priorities to
state leaders similarly to how individual consumers conformed to the laws of supply and
demand.
In this context, it is not surprising that the revival of ethical theorizing about foreign
policy came from philosophy rather than IR, with Michael Walzer, Charles Beitz, and
to a lesser extent Peter Singer all formulating moral theories and arguments that spoke
directly to ethics in world politics. There is no doubt that the insights from these and
other moral philosophers raised the standard of normative thinking in IR. Walzer’s
“morality of states” paradigm was familiar to those working within an international
 Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World    499

society framework, although Walzer (1977) posed more sharply the conundrums and
dilemmas associated with modern applications of the just war tradition. Beitz’s (1979)
cosmopolitan commitments enabled him to advance a powerful argument in favour of
global redistributive justice, questioning why artificial state borders should be allowed
to determine ownership of natural resources.
Interventions by political and moral philosophers provided an impetus to the devel-
opment of normative theorizing in IR; at the same time, some of the limitations of phil-
osophies of the international were exposed. One limitation was the tendency among
those of a cosmopolitan persuasion to privilege a post-​sovereign understanding of a
world community. This can lead to an ill-​thought-​out belief in the capability and moral
standing of global civil society despite concerns about the unaccountable and undemo-
cratic power that they wield (Brown 2003). A second limitation relates to the tendency
among certain forms of political theory to construct what Rawls calls “ideal theory”
rather than “telling us how to get on in the world as it is” (cited in Brown 2002: 20).

The Return of Ethics in Foreign Policy

As IR began to take a normative turn in the 1980s and early 1990s, evident in pathbreak-
ing books by Linklater (1982) and Brown (1992), we saw serious engagement not only
with philosophical thought but also with questions and dilemmas in the formulation of
contemporary foreign policy. Linklater was involved in a pioneering collaborative pro-
ject on ethics and foreign policy which debated Gareth Evans’s concept of “good inter-
national citizenship” (Keal 1992).
Evans was Australia’s foreign minister from 1988 to 1996 at a time when the con-
straints of the Cold War were loosening. For Evans, good international citizenship was
an attempt to find a third way between realism and idealism. He rejected realism on the
grounds that the national interest was necessarily opposed to the promotion of human
rights. He rejected idealism on the grounds that politics necessarily involved the prob-
lem of “dirty hands,” as opposed to believing that divergent interests could always be
reconciled. Evans was taken by Hedley Bull’s (1973) injunction that they ought to pursue
“purposes beyond themselves” but not at all costs. We see this mixture of moral purpose
and pragmatism in Evans’s writings and speeches on the Responsibility to Protect (see
Chapter 25). One element in his criteria for intervention is what he calls “the balance of
consequences” (Evans 2009: 20); in other words, even when the moral case for armed
intervention is unanswerable, it still doesn’t make it the right policy choice. It may be,
for example, that the perpetrators of the atrocities cannot be effectively targeted without
significant civilian casualties; or that the state committing the crime may have powerful
allies who are prepared to threaten military strikes against the intervening powers.
The second contemporary case study that attracted the attention of IR scholars inter-
ested in ethics and foreign policy was the arrival in office of the first Blair government
in May 1994. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook was bold enough not only to set out a for-
eign policy strategy for the UK but also to openly declare that it had to have “an ethical
500   Tim Dunne

dimension” (1997). Human rights were to be at the heart of this new foreign policy. Not
surprisingly, this aspect of Labour’s new thinking on foreign policy attracted consider-
able attention from the media but also from the IR academy.
It is commonplace for this “ethical dimension” to be cited as the principal innovation
in New Labour’s approach to foreign policy, implying that previous administrations
have not pursued an ethical foreign policy. The inference that ethics have been “added
and stirred” into the rest of the agenda underestimates the extent to which British for-
eign policy has always accommodated a particular understanding of ethics, in terms
of both who the community is and how it is to be enhanced or secured. Indeed, Cook
himself implied that ethics was something which was separate from the rest of the pol-
icy process, as though security, trade, and the environment stood outside of normative
questions about what is to be valued and who is to be privileged. In contrast to this view
of morality as something which is separate from other interests and which can be taken
up (or left out) by a Foreign Secretary at will, foreign policy can never be “morality-​free”
(Booth 1997).
The question that interested IR theorists during the 1990s was whether the discourse
emerging from practitioners such as Evans and Cook evidenced a normative shift in
the moral responsibilities of states (Wheeler and Dunne 1998). The point here is that
it was arguably misplaced to measure normative change by how far liberal states were
prepared to use force in defence of distant strangers. This kind of humanitarian inter-
vention has always been the exception rather than the rule. Instead, a better test was to
grasp whether there had been a change in international legitimacy. Two related shifts
suggested this had been the case. Within liberal states, it had become increasingly dif-
ficult for state leaders to claim that protecting human rights abroad was of no concern
to them (even if there were moral or prudential reasons why non-​intervention was pre-
ferred in practice). Also, by the early 1990s, it was evident that the regimes of all mem-
bers of international society were now exposed to “to the legitimate appraisal of their
peers,” as R. J. Vincent (1986: 152) had anticipated in his classic work on human rights.
Returning to the Australia case, we see how the internationalism of the 1990s sought
to cooperate to achieve collective goods across a range of issue-​specific regimes, includ-
ing peace operations, arms control, the environment, drugs, and refugees. Evans recog-
nized that Australia, as a middle power lacking significant military capabilities, had a
long-​term security interest in promoting a rule-​governed international order; and here
we see how good international citizenship is compatible with the goals of both national
security and international order. What this third way conception of foreign policy did
not confront head-​on was the thorny question of what is to be done when the national
interest cannot be reconciled with an international norm. One creative answer comes
from Andrew Linklater, who argued that good international citizens are not required to
sacrifice their vital security interests out of fidelity to the rules of international society,
but they are required “to put the welfare of international society ahead of the relentless
pursuit of [their] own national interests” (1992: 28–​9).
The dilemmas addressed in this literature reflected the stark tension that existed
in world politics between the dominant sovereignty-​based order and the growing
 Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World    501

aspiration for all peoples to have their basic human rights protected. Thinking about
ethics and foreign policy according to this order/​justice dualism—​and the different
configurations of it advanced by so-​called pluralists and solidarists—​proved to be both
productive and limiting. Productive in the sense that normative change within inter-
national society was illustrated by the emergence of practices that challenged the sov-
ereignty-​based order. Limiting in the sense that the cases tended to be restricted to a
handful of Western powers (Lawler 2005), whose attachments to ethical standards
proved to be uneven at best or hypocritical at worst if we take the 2003 Iraq war as being
illustrative.
Those who had opened up to the possibility that the UK, Australia, and Canada might
realign their foreign policies in accordance with “good international citizenship” were
confronted by the reality that the powerful liberal states had become highly prone to war
against non-​Western powers who allegedly constituted a threat to national security.
One effect of this stark reality was to shift the ethics and foreign policy debate away
from evaluating the conduct of particular states and towards a focus on the changing
character of norms and responsibilities within international regimes and institutions. In
the following section, I look at this evolving normative order, starting with an overview
of human rights and their eventual intrusion into foreign policy-​making.

Which Ethics? Human Rights

and Humanitarianism

While the articulation of a general obligation “to protect innocents abroad” can be
found in texts as early as Grotius’ Laws of War and Peace, the institutionalization of
human rights is largely a post-​1945 phenomena. Shortly after the guns and bombs fell
silent, the new United Nations system incorporated the idea of universal community of
humankind into its founding documents, including the UN Charter (1945) as well as the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). These documents were strong with
respect to advocating for the defence of human rights within the territorial boundaries
of the state; yet they were weak with respect to the obligations that states incurred when
confronted with humanitarian emergencies occurring beyond their borders.
As the fragile post-​1945 peace collapsed and Cold War rivalry began to dominate the for-
eign policy agenda, human rights became marginal to the priorities of the major powers in
the international system. This point was crisply made by Henry Kissinger, who described
“the protection of basic human rights” as being “a very sensitive aspect of the domestic jur-
isdiction of [ . . . ] governments” (cited in Foot 2000: 42). In other words, despite the nor-
mative ambition of the Charter, the Declaration, and the anti-​genocide Convention, the
prevailing standard of legitimacy in international relations remained very much on the side
of the sovereign rather than rights of individuals to be protected from unnecessary harm.
502   Tim Dunne

The Power of Principled Norms: Human Rights

The primacy accorded to national security did not completely drown out the conver-
sation that had begun at the beginning of the United Nations order. This is evident in
the debate between Eastern and Western Europe about establishing a rules-​based sys-
tem that would normalize relations between the two spheres. By the late 1960s, pol-
icy-​makers in the European Community were increasingly interested in coordinating
their foreign policies and promoting values of democracy and liberty for all European
peoples. The process that Western Europe favoured to pursue their normative goals
was a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The communiqué
of the 1975 CSCE, known as the Helsinki Final Act, recognized the territorial status quo
between East and West.
Despite protestations at the inclusion of human rights into the discussions, the Soviet
Union wanted the normalization sufficiently keenly that it signed up to a text that
included norms stipulating that the protection of human rights was a legitimate compo-
nent of the diplomatic process among the thirty-five members of the CSCE process. The
Soviet Union even published the entire text of the Final Act in the newspaper Izvestia,
presumably to draw attention to its diplomatic achievements. But in so doing, it had
unwittingly provided a focal point for Soviet dissidents and prompted the creation of
numerous INGOs—​called Helsinki Watch Committees—​to monitor Soviet compliance
with its terms (Foot 2000: 41; Thomas 2001).
One important conclusion that should be drawn from the Helsinki process, and
the subsequent influence that human rights thinking exerted on the reforming Soviet
regime led by Mikhail Gorbachev, is the way principled norms are socialized and dif-
fused. By “norms” in relation to human rights, we mean “standards of governance that
impose positive and negative obligations on states to ensure the basic security, freedom,
and dignity of individuals and groups within their jurisdiction” (Thomas 2001: 8).
The eventual fall of the communist regime in the Soviet Union showed that govern-
ments were often not in control of the process that they had started back in 1975. Even a
state as formidable as the Soviet Union was unable to withstand the unrelenting resist-
ance mounted by domestic and transnational NGOs working with dissidents, intellec-
tuals, and trade unionists. Alongside persuasion, the case also shows how governments
can be entangled in a web of their own deceit and double standards. This entrapment
was neatly captured by Charter 77, the political movement campaigning for democracy
and freedom in Czechoslovakia. Talking back to their communist occupiers from the
East, they said: “you have signed this, you must honour this” (Thomas 2005: 128).
This particular story had two endings. In the case of Russia, the reforms that were
impacted by human rights and common security were insufficiently institutionalized
to withstand the rise of authoritarian rule supported by populist nationalism. Yet losing
Russia to the liberal international order does not detract “in any way from the contribu-
tion that human rights ideas and norms made to ending the Cold War” (Thomas 2005:
140). It was the language and struggle concerning universal rights and freedoms that
enabled the powerless peoples of Eastern Europe to become powerful.
 Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World    503

The Humanitarian Order

and its Critics

While individual states, including great powers, can disengage from their international
responsibilities to protect human rights, that does not necessarily foretell “the end of
the human rights era” (Ignatieff 2002). The reason for this resilience lies in the global-
ization of humanitarianism. Almost every UN Security Resolution includes passages
on humanitarian relief and civilian protection; multilateral conferences on the envir-
onment or development agree to goals to reduce the harms experienced by the “bottom
billion”; thousands of NGOs campaign for improvements in compliance with a long
list of human rights agreements in relation to basic freedoms, welfare rights, and the
improvement of labour conditions.
All these initiatives, practices, and struggles bear witness to the fact that there has
been a significant and growing consensus, among practitioners and peoples alike, that
the moral purpose of states and non-​state actors should be to protect those in immedi-
ate danger and to prevent unnecessary suffering. Michael Barnett (2011: 1) refers to these
moral sensibilities, embodied “in discourses of compassion, responsibility, and care,” as
an international humanitarian order.
Protecting and preventing human suffering is often associated with a liberal rights-​
based understanding of ethics; it is also the case, however, that an orientation to pro-
tect all life resonates in a multiplicity of religions and civilizations. The more relevant
question is not where this ethical commitment comes from so much as how widely it is
held. This is not just a question of the degree to which there is a consensus that unneces-
sary suffering is a bad thing; it is also a question of how deeply held this conviction is.
In short, how much do “we” (those living in relative security and prosperity) care about
“them” (the impoverished and dispossessed)?
If we think about this question in relation to the actions and decisions taken by states,
we are likely to conclude that the humanitarian order only captures part of a wider world
political system in which many states continue to formulate their foreign policies in
relation to economic and strategic priorities. The aspiration of the internationalist, that
states act as “local agents of a world common good” (Bull 1984), is hard to reconcile with
the lack of progress in relation to the goals and values agreed to by various UN bodies
(such as the seventeen “global goals” which guide the UN development agency’s work).
The plain fact is that states, particularly great powers, continue to be wary of signing
up to conventions or declarations that bind them to take action in pursuit of cosmo-
politan ends. Far from living up to their special responsibilities as great powers, the
experience of the post-​1945 order is one in which even the worst atrocities such as geno-
cide have not been prevented or responded to in a decisive and timely manner. And
where UN agencies have intervened in the name of international peace and security,
they are often perceived in the global South as being little better than the colonizers who
preceded them.
504   Tim Dunne

Should we conclude that the humanitarian order is a sham? Do state leaders and their
scribes merely pay lip service to their obligations to protect peoples from harm and pre-
vent unnecessary suffering? Many do in fact believe that humanitarianism is some kind
of malaise: lots of public and private actors busily trying to do good while unintention-
ally generating unhealthy economic dependencies and creating social relationships that
are hierarchical and racialized.
The response given by proponents of the IHO is that it would be naive to think that
the order “operates free from power and politics” (Barnett 2011: 15). Even when foreign
policies are guided by a duty to prevent or protect other peoples from harm, it is always
likely to be the case that other considerations intervene—​not least other moral values
that would weigh heavily on the shoulders of decision-​makers, such as the safety and
security of their service personnel. Power and politics will also collide with moral obli-
gations when it comes to the resourcing of humanitarian operations. How and why
some disasters get significant aid relief and others are met with indifference shows that
the humanitarian order is layered with degrees of complexity and inconsistency. The
project of conjoining liberal conceptions of ethics to foreign policy is at best incomplete.
Writing over fifty years ago, Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (1966) captured
this tension neatly when they wrote about statecraft as being informed both by “prin-
ciples of prudence and moral obligation.” A fundamental reason why prudence mat-
tered to these classical scholars is that they recognized the fact of cultural diversity, and
that institutions had to mediate these differences for the sake of the common good of
order (Bull 1977).

Conclusion

This chapter began by suggesting that ethics and foreign policy have always been awk-
ward partners. There are many layers to this claim which need to be “peeled” back.
Conventional accounts of the history of IR often represent a stark rupture between real-
ism’s account of power politics and internationalism’s aspirations to promote duties
beyond borders. Even if it is true that many self-​styled realists were partly responsible for
the rupture, it is nevertheless important to question whether realism was always more
hospitable to ethics than IR historiography has hitherto taken for granted. In Chapter 48
of this Handbook, Duncan Bell makes this point very well when he demythologizes the
view that “realists deny space for moral reflection in international politics.”
So instead of buying into this version of IR’s past, one could argue that the normative
theory revivalists of the 1990s might have been better placed re-​evaluating the ethical
claims of classical realists rather than reaching for the “ideal theory” that characterized
Rawls’s and Beitz’s conception of the international. If Bell is right about IR’s past, clas-
sical realists such as Carr, Morgenthau, and Herz would certainly have been unsurprised
to see the retreat from internationalism by many liberal states initially after 9/​11 and sub-
sequently with the shift to the authoritarian “right” in 2016.
 Ethical Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World    505

Narratives of humanitarianism that were discussed in relation to the Helsinki process

through to the end of the Cold War can be seen as an attempt to reconstitute the rela-
tionship between ethics and foreign policy along more harmonious lines. With these
narratives, an attempt is made to overcome the tension within the awkward partner-
ship, as foreign policy behaviours are driven by, and evaluated against, liberal norms and
standards. The claim that there exists an international humanitarian order is an example
of the integration of the two domains: in this world, the policies of states and NGOs have
to be aligned with liberal universalist values and beliefs.
Aspirations to bring harmony to the relationship between ethics and foreign policy
have had their day, for now at least. Liberalism is in retreat both as a comprehensive
doctrine and as a compass to guide the ship of state. A new multipolarity is replacing
the liberal international order, and with its demise, many universal rights claims will
be renegotiated in the process. This pivot towards a more polycentric order presents an
opportunity to recover realist conceptions of ethics where the realm of the political is
understood to have its own logic such that it imposes moral limits on international act-
ors (Rossi and Sleat 2014). In the context of the irreducibility of value conflicts among
states and peoples, a tolerable level of international order may be preferable to the risk of
striving for the greater good only to find that such normative ambition has undermined
the consensus that exists on the basic conditions for cooperation.

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the constructive feedback received from the editors and the
research assistance provided by Dr Constance Duncombe.

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 ­c hapter 38

Fair Trade Unde r Fi re

How to Think about Fair Trade in Theory and Practice

Nicole Hassoun

Efforts to promote fair trade are under fire—​critics argue that there is no obligation
to purchase Fair Trade certified products, and that doing so may even be counterpro-
ductive. This chapter addresses a few of these worries and offers a new approach to argu-
ing about what makes trade fair. It understands arguments about fairness in trade to be
quite wide-​ranging—​to include everything from disputes about whether free trade is
fair to whether fairness requires purchasing particular “Fair Trade certified” products. It
is not concerned with justice simpliciter or with fairness outside of trade relationships. It
asks: to what extent must ethical principles governing fairness in trade engage with the
real-​world politics of trade? What should the relationship be between ethical trade the-
ory and empirical research on international trade?
In “Fair Trade: What Does It Mean and Why Does It Matter?” David Miller con-
siders three broad accounts of fair trade that, he suggests, might just focus on differ-
ent (and potentially conflicting) aspects of fairness in trade (Miller 2010). On some
accounts, what matters is procedural fairness. The rules of trade have to be fair for all,
and outcomes are irrelevant. Often these accounts assume that trading partners are
self-​interested, and focus on equality of opportunity to benefit from trade. On other
accounts, producers are entitled to safeguards against harms. Trade should not be
allowed to violate rights or undermine welfare. Yet others focus on whether the practice
of trade is fair; “exchanges must be conducted on terms that produce a particular div-
ision of resources or benefits between the trading partners” (Miller 2010: 24).
Perhaps because I endorse Miller’s claim that we should be pluralists about what
fairness requires, this chapter criticizes attempts to provide complete accounts of what
makes trade fair. It suggests an approach to arguing about what fair trade requires that
may help us make more moral progress in light of these potentially conflicting (some-
times empirical) requirements of fairness. That is, it suggests offering conditional argu-
ments for or against principles governing fairness in trade. The approach may seem weak
because, at best, conditional arguments can provide some criteria for good policies—​they
 Fair Trade Under Fire    509

suggest that fair trade must, for instance, respect human rights or be free from oppres-
sion. But such arguments are strong, as they can avoid the worry that many different
plausible criteria for fairness in trade are inconsistent. Moreover, the kind of arguments
this chapter supports need not provide only weak moral requirements. They might start
from demanding moral requirements (either taking these requirements as given or
arguing for the requirements in attempting to establish their conclusions more firmly).
The kind of argument recommended here might assume, for instance, that trade must
ensure equal opportunity for all. This approach can allow us to make some progress in
the absence of a theory about how exactly to take into account all the things that matter.
To make this case, I first consider two different attempts to provide complete accounts
of Fair Trade—​Aaron James’s account in Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for the
Global Economy and Malgorzata Kurjanska and Mathias Risse’s account in “Fairness in
Trade II: Export Subsidies and the Fair Trade Movement” (2008). I explain where each
account goes wrong and suggest that the problems these accounts face stem, at least in
part, from their approach—​the fact that they purport to offer complete accounts of fair
trade. I then give examples of some arguments for obligations of fairness in trade that
do not fall prey to this kind of objection. I explain how these arguments are compatible
with arguments from other perspectives as well.
In some ways, the arguments that follow bear more broadly on another debate about
fair trade in the literature. Both accounts of fair trade this chapter criticizes are practice-​
based accounts. That is, they suppose that if we can give an account of the purpose of fair
trade as a social practice, we can give an account of fair trade. This is opposed to a more
holistic approach that considers whether trade’s consequences, and procedures, are
compatible with broader accounts of (say) global justice (see Chapters 8 and 9) or what
morality requires (see Chapter 10). In rejecting practice-​based approaches, the chapter
suggests another dimension along which we should broaden our attempts to account for
the fairness of trade in general (or particular trade policies). We should not assume that
they are justified because they are part of any given practice. The claim that we should
embrace the results of a practice requires justification—​though one might give condi-
tional arguments on the assumption that the practice is justified.

Practice-​Based Attempts to Provide

Complete Accounts of Fair Trade

Consider a practice-​based account of fair trade embodied in James’s work. James

believes that questions of fairness arise within a social relationship that “embeds market
relations” in the practice of free trade that “allows and regulates economic interdepend-
ence” (James 2009: 5). He provides a constructivist theory that starts from a concep-
tion of the purpose of trade and an account of fairness as structural equity to provide
some policy guidance. He believes that the distribution of gains from trade between
510   Nicole Hassoun

countries must be equal.1 In part this is because the purpose of free trade is for countries
to increase their national income (James 2009: 5).

Egalitarian claims, concerned with relative gains or losses, are held by [ . . . ] societies.
Such claims are claims to the fruit of the relevant social cooperation, specifically, to
the type of good the trade relation is intended to create, on the basis of participation
in their joint creation [ . . . ] the central aim of international market reliance is the
augmentation of national incomes. (James 2009: 5)

James believes, however, that trade should not make people worse off than they would
be under autarky. There should be social safety nets in place to protect those in desperate
need. The gains from trade within countries should be fairly distributed (James 2012).
He also embraces the “domestic relative gains principle” which specifies that the gains
from trade in each (trading) nation should generally be equally distributed between
individuals (p. 18).
Much of James’s book is devoted to addressing sceptics. He thinks unrestricted free
trade will not be efficient even if people are not compensated for their losses. Moreover,
given that trade is a social practice, he thinks that the trading partners who jointly create
the rules of trade must justify their collective exercise of coercive power. He thinks we
cannot come up with justifiable principles of fairness without considering the current
practice. Moreover, he points out that the concern for fairness underlying his approach
unifies concern for fair wages, fair competition, and fair trade. Finally, he suggests that
we have reason to care about the risks free trade in capital poses to people, and to rework
some trade practices, such as the rules embodied in the World Trade Organization’s
Trade-​Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement, to better correspond with the
principles for fairness in trade he defends.
It is not entirely clear, however, that James has properly characterized the practice of
“fair trade.” There may, for instance, be multiple practices to which one could appeal—​
sometimes different trade agreements, with different rules, cover the same transactions,
for instance. What practice is at issue may be unclear.
Appealing to what international organizations governing trade—​like the World Trade
Organization (WTO)—​say does not help. What these organizations say, even about a
part of the practice (e.g. trade in services), varies from time to time. The rules are con-
stantly evolving as member states reach new agreements (WTO 2014). Moreover, the
content of some agreements is disputed and the agreements may not even be consistent
at a single point in time. This becomes evident when one attends to the legal text and dis-
cussions in international tribunals (Lui and Bilal 2009; Qureshi 2006).
Even if the practice is as James describes it, however, it may not be the case that the
primary aim of free trade should just be to ensure that countries make mutually benefi-
cial exchanges etc. If not, James’s argument will not go through. Some reasons for scep-
ticism that the primary aim of free trade should just be to ensure that countries make
mutually beneficial exchanges etc. stem from problems with this principle’s grounding.
The WTO clearly takes the principle of comparative advantage to imply that trade will
 Fair Trade Under Fire    511

yield absolute gains in national income arising from international specialization and
exchange. However, comparative advantage may not generate substantial benefits or
even any absolute gains at all (Hassoun 2008; 2009). Free trade based on this principle
may also be inequitable.
More generally, we might question James’s understanding of the purpose of free trade
if we believe we are obligated to pursue different objectives. Perhaps, for instance, the
gains from trade should maximally benefit the least well off globally. Perhaps, if the gains
from trade do not maximally benefit the least well off globally, those who can should try
to alter, or work around, these rules by, for examaple, buying Fair Trade certified goods
(Hassoun 2012b; 2009; 2008).
James defends his Rawlsian constructivist methodology and attempts to make sure
his appeal to a conception of the practice is justifiable in “Constructing Justice for
Existing Practice: Rawls and the Status Quo” (James 2005). He suggests that construct-
ive interpretation has three stages. First, one identifies a practice in non-​controversial
terms. Second, one offers a thicker moral characterization of its purpose or aim. Finally,
one explains what is necessary to justify the practice.
At crucial points, however, James’ argument appears to me to elide the distinction
between the correctness of a description of a practice (in sociological terms) and the
(moral) correctness of its application. It may be the case that he has explained what
would justify the practice of fair trade as he understands it if it must be in place. That
does not establish that we should do what would justify his understanding of the prac-
tice of fair trade even if it is accurate. Nor does it show that he has the right conception of
fairness in trade tout court. Consider an analogy: it may be the case that the best under-
standing of a practice is as a dictatorship, and a good dictator should rule through fear.
This in no way justifies having a dictatorship even if it is led by a good dictator (never
mind ensuring that the dictator rules through fear).
In their work, Kurjanska and Risse argue for a different account of what one kind of
fair trade requires. On Kurjanska and Risse’s account, fairness is a matter of justice that is
concerned with what people are due. They explain that charity cannot be a requirement
of justice or fairness because no one is owed charity. Furthermore, they believe that fair-
ness requires satisfying individuals’ claims appropriately, and that we need to know how
to do that to know what fairness requires. They accept a deontological account of how to
appropriately satisfy competing claims.2 On this account, everyone has a claim to their
entitlements, deserts, and satisfaction of their needs. Kurjanska and Risse (2008) believe
that we should “satisfy claims within each category proportionately.”
Kurjanska and Risse worry that Fair Trade purchases are not generally justified
because they are not part of the best development strategy (2008: 25). In oppressive
regimes, for instance, we may better help poor people by working to end oppression.
Alternately, Fair Trade may not be the best development strategy if it induces poor
people to specialize in producing goods that they would not produce if they were doing
what was in their long-​term best interests. Kurjanska and Risse point out, for instance,
that Costa Rica’s successful development depends on moving away from producing
goods traditionally associated with fair trade.
512   Nicole Hassoun

In Costa Rica a focus on new exports and eco-​tourism allowed for diversification
away from coffee and bananas. The export share of non-​traditional products rose
from 38.6% in 1982 to 87% in 2003. Consumers who would have supported Fair Trade
with regard to coffee and bananas in Costa Rica would have resisted a shift that in the
long run turned out for the better. (One may even argue that providing opportun-
ities for farmers to transition out of farming improved the lot of those who entered a
new more profitable and less volatile sector. Moreover, by decreasing production of
bananas, it increased returns for those who retained their business. It can be asserted
that by providing aid and higher than market price returns to those who can obtain
its label, it simultaneously provides incentives for others to continue in or even enter
an unprofitable market with hopes to gain access to the limited Fair Trade market.)
(Kurjanska and Risse 2008: 28–​9)

In some conditions, Kurjanska and Risse think Fair Trade is permissible. We may lack
a better way of helping a country—​it may be impossible, for instance, for a country’s
workers to refocus production in better ways. Alternately, Fair Trade might address
injustices that undermine poor producers’ prospects. Still, Kurjanska and Risse believe
that Fair Trade cannot generally be justified.3
We need not inquire into the prospects for Fair Trade to promote development
(though I do so elsewhere) to conclude that Kurjanska and Risse’s account of what
constitutes a fair practice is no better justified than James’s. They do not argue, at any
length, that Fair Trade should promote countries’ development. They just claim that one
would arrive at this result on a roughly Rawlsian account of fairness (Kurjanska and
Risse 2008). Perhaps the purpose of Fair Trade should not be to promote development.
Perhaps, for instance, it should promote poor individuals’ welfare. If so, and if develop-
ment is not a good means to that end, Fair Trade should not promote development.4
More generally, if practice-​based inquiry does not justify the assumed purpose of the
practice, and the practice should be changed, practice-​based accounts will not help us
answer question like: “What kinds of trade are, all things considered, morally im/​per-
missible or required?” Advocates of practice-​based accounts must defend the moral sig-
nificance of the current practice. One way of illustrating this general point is to suggest
alternative ways the practice might be set up. James might not, for instance, be justified
in giving a privileged role to states in trade agreements that specify the rules of trade; the
rules might be restructured to show equal concern for all of those affected by trade in
one of the ways suggested in the alternative accounts (e.g. trade relationships may have
to be reciprocal in some sense or avoid discrimination) (Miller 2010).5 Some suggest
that practice-​based conceptions fall prey to a “status quo” bias for this reason (James
2012). Maintaining the current practice may even prevent us from establishing a better
practice.
Practice-​based theorists might appeal to Amartya Sen’s work on global justice in try-
ing to overcome this objection. Sen suggests we need not aim to achieve full justice—​we
may do better to just make some moral progress. In this case, even if some other way of
setting up the rules of trade might be better, we might be justified in focusing on the cur-
rent practice (Sen 2006).
 Fair Trade Under Fire    513

The problem with this proposal is that we may head down the wrong path and get
stuck on a local optimum (where all changes appear to be changes for the worse). If
we explored the possible space of policies more fully, we might do better. In this con-
text, that means that sticking with the current rules may not be the best—​or even a
very good—​option. We might do best to modify, or even completely alter, the current
practice.
How can we avoid these kinds of problems in theorizing about what fair trade
requires, in particular? One possibility is to constrain practice-​based arguments by spe-
cifying that they hold only insofar as the purported practice is justified.6 More generally,
it seems we can give constrained, or conditional, arguments for many conclusions that
would not follow without such constraints or conditionalization. This is the conditional
approach that this chapter advocates and that the next section will consider.

An Alternative Approach

What can we say about different kinds of trade on the conditional approach? On the
conditional approach, the idea is to argue for more modest conclusions like “Trade is
permissible if it does not violate rights and it is impermissible if it does violate rights,” or
“Trade is required if it promotes individual welfare.” This approach has the advantage of
letting its proponents adopt (or argue for) different principles for fairness in trade in dif-
ferent circumstances. If the authors do not defend these principles, they are conditional
on the principles proving defensible. Practice-​based approaches might, for instance, tell
us only that trade is im/​permissible or required if the purpose of trade is as specified.
How interesting and important conditional arguments will be depends, in part, on
what conditions they include. If the conditions are satisfied in the actual world, they can
be very important. Even if the conditions are not satisfied, the derivation of the conclu-
sion from the conditions and other premises may be novel and insightful. In some cases,
such arguments are also important. They may tell us what to do in the long term given
how conditions are likely to evolve (or how we can change the conditions). Giving (or
accepting) arguments that start from actual conditions does not require denying that
much more fundamental change is necessary. Such arguments may just tell us what we
should do from where we are to make things better. And perhaps that it is in this sense
that we should strive for a realistic utopia.
Consider a few examples of conditional arguments that consider whether trade fulfils
different moral requirements. In a series of papers on free trade, for instance, I suggest
that insofar as free trade makes it more difficult for people to meet their basic needs, or
destroys the natural environment, we have one reason to object to it. Free trade is likely
to have mixed impacts on the things that matter, so we should try to capture the bene-
fits of free trade for the poor and the environment while avoiding the costs (Hassoun
2012; 2009; 2012b). Of course, if it is not the case that we should care about trade’s impact
on the poor or the environment, these arguments will not go through. There can be
514   Nicole Hassoun

countervailing considerations. But if the assumption holds and there are no counter-​
veiling considerations, we have reason to restructure, or work around, some of the rules
of trade to capture free trade’s benefits and avoid its costs for the poor and for the natural
environment (Hassoun 2012; 2009; 2012b).7
It is also possible to argue against particular trade agreements based on these kinds
of concerns. Suppose, for instance, that trade should not make it more difficult, or
impossible, for people to meet their basic needs. One may say people have a right
not to suffer severe poverty. Moreover, this right may give rise to demanding obli-
gations on the part of states and, when states fail, international organizations. Even
some seemingly permissible policies that make trade conditional on many economic
reforms may be impermissible. Traditional economic conditionality on loans (a kind
of trade in money) or conditions set on a country’s ability to trade may be impermis-
sible. Consider the case of Bolivia, which was required to privatize its water supply as a
condition of receiving a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). When the
water supply was privatized, many people were not able to afford clean water (Hassoun
2012b). Of course, if people had not already been so poor, or subsidies had been intro-
duced, the privatization might have been acceptable. Moreover, the conditions might
have been necessary for Bolivia to repay the loan and improve its economic status. The
privatization may even have helped more people than it hurt. But if the conception of
rights at issue requires international organizations like the IMF to do more for people
than they are currently doing, the conditionality may be objectionable.
Although conditional arguments may seem weak because they only provide some cri-
teria for good policies, they are strong because they can avoid the problem of inconsist-
ency that Miller raises for endorsing a plurality of principles governing trade—​namely,
that they may give inconsistent recommendations. He gives an example where the (he
assumes) procedurally fair requirements of the WTO to liberalize trade in bananas con-
flict with protecting poor banana farmers in a way that might be required on an account
of what division of resources between trading partners is necessary to make trade fair
(Miller 2010). It is quite plausible, however, that we should both protect poor farmers
and liberalize trade which will reduce the amount of banana farming in the Caribbean.
We can give conditional arguments for each conclusion that do not conflict. (The chal-
lenge of finding some way of fulfilling both of these moral obligations remains, however.)
Consider one more example of a conditional argument about fairness in trade. One
might believe everyone has a right to avoid severe poverty and hold that individuals
should purchase Fair Trade certified goods because doing so will help fulfil this right.
There is a lot of evidence to the effect that Fair Trade programmes benefit the poor
(Ruben, 2008; Becchetti and Marco, 2006; Barham and Weber, 2012; Arnould, Plastina,
and Ball, 2009; Raynolds and Ngcwangu, 2010; Raynolds, 2009; Taylor, 2005; Weber
2011; Elder, Zerriffi, and Billon 2012; Wilson 2010; Bassett 2010). Fair Trade farm-
ers benefit from better access to training, credit, and support programmes (Murray,
Raynolds, and Taylor 2003; Bacon, 2005). Participating in Fair Trade cooperatives can
help farmers develop their organizational capacities to create better markets for their
goods (Raynolds 2002; Bacon 2005; Calo and Wise 2005; Milford 2004: 76; Ronchi
2002; Bacon 2005; Taylor 2002; Imhof and Lee 2007). Such co-​operatives give farmers
 Fair Trade Under Fire    515

essential information and bargaining power and improve welfare by providing educa-
tion and credit (Milford 2004).8 Fair Trade farmers are also less vulnerable to shocks
(Wilson 2010), and participating in Fair Trade networks can improve gender equality
(Bassett 2010).
Perhaps the most cited impact is that the poor benefit from higher prices for fair trade
goods (McMahon 2001). Fair Trade coffee growers frequently do better than farmers who
do not participate in Fair Trade networks (Imhof and Lee 2007). There is even evidence that
Fair Trade farmers can do better than those who try to secure the “Organic” label (Calo and
Wise 2005; Milford 2004; Ronchi 2002; Bacon 2005; Taylor 2002; Imhof and Lee 2007).
The higher prices Fair Trade provides often help the poor reduce their vulnerability
to market crises and retain their lands (Bacon 2005; Wilson 2010). Some find that Fair
Trade farmers are more likely to educate their children, and that Fair Trade can help
them meet their basic needs for things like adequate water, food, and housing (Murray
et al. 2003; Bacon 2005). Fair Trade can help farmers secure better job prospects (Bacon
2005), increase their social capital (Elder 2012), acquire more valuable land, and secure
larger animal stocks as well as other agricultural inputs (Ruben 2012).
There are, of course, many criticisms of evaluations of Fair Trade’s impact. Often the
evidence is based on surveys of Fair Trade participants (Valkila 2009; Wilson 2010).
Some worry that even the more rigorous evaluations do not isolate the cause of Fair
Trade farmers’ success (White and Bamberger 2008). Many studies fail to control for
factors that could explain their results. In any case, impact evaluations certainly vary in
breadth and quality.
However, Fair Trade impact evaluations are improving all the time. Some are
even quasi-​experimental.9 The Centre for International Development Issues in the
Netherlands commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of eight different Fair Trade
programmes focusing on different commodities in various locations. The studies used
a sophisticated form of propensity score-​matching. Most demonstrated that Fair Trade
programmes improved participants’ access to food and credit. Many Fair Trade farmers
also had better housing, land, and education than otherwise equivalent farmers. A few
studies found that once Fair Trade made up a large enough portion of the market, prices
and wages increased in a larger region.10
There are also some criticisms of Fair Trade’s economic impact, though evidence of
its positive impact remains. Often, participating in Fair Trade networks is not sufficient
to help small-​scale farmers avoid debt and escape poverty. Moreover, the evidence that
they reduce gender inequality is mixed (Lyon 2010; Wilson 2010; Valkila 2009; Ruben
2012). Some complain that Fair Trade does not help the poorest farmers in the poorest
countries (Dragusanu and Nunn 2014). In some cases, participating in Fair Trade net-
works makes little difference to farmers’ income, though it brings benefits in terms of
reducing vulnerability or improving infrastructure (Valkila 2009; Wilson 2010; Ruben
2012). In others, Fair Trade farmers only gain economic benefits from selling a greater
volume of product than non​farmers (Barham and Weber 2012). Sometimes Fair Trade
sets a minimum price threshold so there is little direct benefit from participating in
Fair Trade networks (Ruben 2012). Even in these cases, however, Fair Trade may boost
welfare in the larger community, helping farmers more generally (Ruben 2012).
516   Nicole Hassoun

It is plausible that, since purchasing Fair Trade certified goods (generally) benefits
the poor, we should purchase these products. That is, we have a prima facie obligation to
purchase these goods. This obligation may be defeated in some cases. If someone can-
not afford to purchase Fair Trade certified goods, or there are other conflicting obli-
gations at stake, there may be no obligation to do so. Similarly, if someone has already
done their fair share in helping the poor, they may not have to purchase Fair Trade
goods. Nonetheless, the average consumer in rich countries should purchase Fair Trade
(Hassoun 2012; 2009; 2012b).11

Conclusion

This chapter defended a conditional approach to arguing about fair trade. It suggested
that this approach shows why a common objection to arguments about fairness in
trade is misguided—​in that the arguments for fairness in trade from different per-
spectives are often inconsistent. The chapter has suggested that much inconsistency
can be avoided if we offer conditional arguments for or against principles govern-
ing fairness in trade. We should not assume, for instance, that principles are jus-
tified because they are part of any given practice. Rather, we can suggest adopting
the principles if the practice is justified. Arguments for Fair Trade may also depend
on features of our non-​ideal world—​like the fact that people are not able meet their
basic needs, and collectively we are not doing what we need to do to alleviate poverty.
Although we might hope to arrive at a complete account of what fair trade requires,
we can make some extremely important moral progress even in the absence of such a
theory.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank students and colleagues at Cornell University,
Binghamton University, and Justitia Amplificata as well as Peter Stone, Judith
Lichtenberg, Aaron James, and Gillian Brock for helpful comments on previous ver-
sions of this paper.

Notes
1. Though James does qualify his argument somewhat to allow that human rights consider-
ations may also help specify requirements of fairness.
2. See e.g. Rawls (1999), Pogge (2002), Brock (1998), Buchanan (1990: 227–​52), Hassoun
(2008: 191–​8).
3. There are also many other conflicting accounts of what fair trade requires in practice.
Fernando Teson seems to think, for instance, that we need only respect the rules of free
markets (Teson 2004; Teson and Klick 2007).
 Fair Trade Under Fire    517

4. To some extent, Kurjanska and Risse’s argument is conditional, as they explicitly assume
a (statist) Rawlsian liberal egalitarian framework within which which countries are obli-
gated to ensure that their citizens all have equal opportunities, and inequalities in the dis-
tribution of resources redound to the advantage of the least well off. This, however, is not
enough to defend the idea that the point of fair trade should be to promote development.
The summary of Kurjanska and Risse’s argument is adapted from Hassoun (2011a).
5. In evaluating the claim that we should not give a privileged role to states in trade agree-
ments that specify the rules of trade, it may really matter whether we accept a statist vs
cosmopolitan theory of justice. On statist theories, states have special standing in that
principles of justice apply, at least primarily, within their borders (Sangiovanni 2012; Blake
2001; Miller 2010). States are supposed to provide a structure of rules that uphold justice,
and might plausibly be both the proper agents to negotiate and the subjects of the rules of
fair trade. On the other hand, cosmopolitans tend to focus on the moral importance of
individuals wherever they reside (Brock 1998; Moellendorf 2005; Caney 2006; Tan 2004).
They would likely criticize rules that only ensure that states are treated fairly unless this
can be grounded in concern for the distributive consequences of trade globally.
6. This may have been Kurjanska and Risse’s intention, but James clearly intends to establish
his conclusions unconditionally.
7. Note that the kinds of conditional arguments proposed above are not restricted to the
approaches that Miller suggests might provide accounts of fair trade. Environmental con-
cerns, for instance, cannot properly be considered producer’s entitlements, a distributive
result that should come about from an account of fair practice, or a concern for procedural
fairness.
8. As this chapter will discuss, many of these studies do not do enough to establish causation.
Nevertheless, they are amongst the best available (researchers have just started evaluating
fair trade programmes), and provide at least some evidence in favour of the hypothesis
that fair trade can benefit the poor.
9. For discussion of different kinds of empirical evidence, see Hassoun (2010; 2011b).
10. The material regarding fair trade’s impact was adapted from Hassoun (2012a).
11. See Hassoun (2012; 2008; 2009b).

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 ­c hapter 39

In ternationa l Mi g rat i on
and Hum an Ri g h ts

Luara Ferracioli

Liberalism, as a normative ideal, takes persons to be free and equal. Moral cosmopol-
itanism, also as a normative ideal, takes all persons, independent of citizenship, to be
the ultimate units of moral concern. Once we bring these two ideals together, and apply
them to the world in which we live, the fact that individuals cannot generally cross inter-
national borders and settle in the country of their choice becomes particularly trouble-
some. After all, a commitment to freedom for all sits uneasily with our practice of closed
borders, while a commitment to equality for all sits uneasily with the fact that socioeco-
nomic opportunities are unevenly distributed around the globe (see Chapter 9).
Such tension between widely held moral commitments and the world as we find it
has led many scholars to question the moral right of the state to exclude immigrants
as it sees fit (Carens 1987; Cole 2000; Oberman 2013). Their main strategy has been to
stress the value of personal autonomy and the importance of being able to migrate in
order to meet one’s basic needs or pursue projects and relationships that can be best
or only pursued outside one’s country of citizenship. The legal-​institutional outcome of
this view is that international borders should be fairly open, with restrictions on entry
only justified if the arrival of immigrants would lead to social chaos and the breakdown
of public order.
Not everyone agrees. Partly as a response to calls for open borders, a number of schol-
ars have also defended the state’s right to control its borders. This position has been jus-
tified primarily by appeal to the state’s right to self-​determination, grounded in more
basic rights such as freedom of association (Wellman 2008) or socio-​political autonomy
(Miller 2005). The core claim of this position is that some basic interest of the citizenry
generally trumps the interest that prospective immigrants have in a enjoying a greater
degree of autonomy in their personal lives.
In this chapter, I approach the ethics of immigration from a different angle. I start
with the assumption that liberal states have a right to control their borders (I take no
stance on whether illiberal states also have this right) but explore what would be
 International Migration and Human Rights    521

required of them were they to implement migration arrangements that conform with
liberal-​cosmopolitan principles. In particular, I argue that the obligations states have
range from feasibility-​insensitive (to be referred to as states’ “strong” duties of migra-
tion) to feasibility-​sensitive. Moreover, I show that such duties can have as their content
both inclusion and exclusion, and can be grounded in the requirements of liberal just-
ice, mere capacity to assist, and past or foreseeable contribution to harm. The account
therefore aims to realize both theoretical and practical goals. The theoretical goal is to
offer an account of the ethics of immigration that does not advocate for open borders,
but is still compatible with liberal-​cosmopolitanism. The practical goal is to map out a
range of migration-​related actions that states must perform under more and less ideal
conditions.
The chapter is structured in three sections. In the first section, I briefly explain what
is wrong with the current international trends in migration. In the second, I discuss the
strong duties states have with regard to their humanitarian, family reunification, and
skilled-​migration intake. In the third section, I discuss the motivational and institu-
tional constraints that currently prevent states from discharging their “strong” migra-
tion duties, and propose one reasonably feasible strategy that can increase the likelihood
that such duties might be discharged in the future.

Migration Trends

I started this discussion by briefly highlighting the tension between our normative ide-
als and the right of liberal states to exclude. But a less explored tension is that between
our normative ideals and the specific ways liberal states exercise their right to exclude
(once it is granted or assumed that they do in fact have such right).1 This theoretical
neglect has had important practical implications: it has kept most of the debate on the
ethics of immigration at a very abstract level, with proponents and critics of the right to
exclude unable to offer existing states much guidance as to how to improve their migra-
tion arrangements. In what follows, I show that a shift in focus from whether there is a
right to exclude to how this right should be exercised enables us to criticize states for
implementing migration arrangements that both harm and fail to protect vulnerable
persons without appealing to controversial normative and empirical claims about the
desirability and feasibility of a world of open borders.
To see how current migration arrangements negatively affect the most vulnerable
members of the human community, consider that in 2013 it was estimated that there
were more than 232 million international immigrants, roughly 3.2 per cent of the global
population (UN 2013). From all the movers, only 16.7 million were refugees, and even
fewer of them (556,000 or around 3.3 per cent) managed to seek asylum in the affluent
countries of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development
(UNHCR 2014; OECD 2014). Such low numbers of successful migration by refugees
is partly a result of liberal states’ employment of carrier sanctions, visa requirements,
522   Luara Ferracioli

and tight border control, justified by appeals to the necessity of curbing unauthorized
migration, but which have as a perverse (and no doubt intentional) effect the creation
of significant hurdles for those who must migrate in order to seek assistance in the form
of asylum (Betts 2010). At the same time, however, liberal states have kept their bor-
ders quite open for those who possess desirable skills and a capacity for taxpaying. In
2011, the numbers of skilled immigrants arriving in the OECD reached 27 million (UN
2013b).
It is therefore no exaggeration to claim that there is an international race on the part
of liberal states to attract the skilled and repel the needy, which becomes even more
problematic once we recognize that the departure of skilled individuals from develop-
ing nations can have quite negative effects in the capacity of vulnerable populations to
access essential services, such as health care and education—​a phenomenon known in
the literature as “brain drain.”
But apart from not giving priority to those with the strongest need to immigrate, lib-
eral states have also departed from liberal-​cosmopolitanism by developing categories of
inclusion that are problematically under-​inclusive. First, the 1951 Convention Relating
to the Status of Refugees (henceforth: Refugee Convention) privileges the claims of
those who suffer political persecution at the hands of their governments (or groups sup-
ported by their government) over the claims of those who are rendered vulnerable as a
result of the inaction of their government. For instance, mere membership in a failed
state does not qualify one for asylum even though it is extremely hard to secure one’s
fundamental human rights in states virtually devoid of the rule of law and other essen-
tial public institutions. Second, liberal states privilege the claims of spouses and family
members, even though citizens might have a compelling interest in associating with an
intimate they do not enjoy a legally sanctioned relationship with.
In the next sections, I show that these migration trends do not do justice to the basic
interests of the most vulnerable to cross international borders and of all citizens to asso-
ciate with those they share a special relationship with. I also show that the way states
exercise their right to include ignores the urgent interests of citizens in developing coun-
tries not to be harmed unduly by the negative effects associated with certain kinds of
brain drain. This leads me to argue that states must endorse two stringent moral respon-
sibilities (see Chapter 10) in the area of immigration: a duty to include and a duty to
exclude, so that the basic interests currently neglected in migration arrangements are
better protected.

State Duties

In order to see which migration arrangements are morally desirable, we must first
idealize the context under which states design and implement their migration arrange-
ments. Let us therefore imagine a world where states are sufficiently motivated to bring
their migration arrangements in line with what morality requires. Let us also imagine
 International Migration and Human Rights    523

that they have the right sort of institutional apparatus to implement policies and pro-
grammes that are geared towards the protection and promotion of fundamental human
rights at the international level. In practice, this means that states will protect vulnerable
persons from human rights violations by third parties, as well as refrain from contribut-
ing to any causal chain that foreseeably leads to human rights deficits abroad.
Now, the point about imagining such a world—​and thereby partly engaging in so-​
called ideal theorizing—​is not to deny that that there are significant motivational and
institutional constraints that prevent states from acting rightly within the domain of
migration. Rather, the aim here is simply to isolate the morally relevant features of inter-
national migration by assuming away the fact that states are neither typically motiv-
ated to act on their moral obligations nor typically capable of mobilizing their domestic
and international institutions for the successful and widespread protection and pro-
motion of fundamental human rights. Indeed, once we put aside feasibility concerns
about moral action at the international level, we are in a better position to focus on the
core human interests at stake, and well-​placed to answer the following question: in a
world where states act legitimately when they retain some control over their immigra-
tion arrangements, which moral claims are sufficiently weighty so as to impose limits
on the right of states to include and exclude? In what follows, I argue that there are two
classes of persons who impose limits on the right of states to exclude: refugees, broadly
conceived, and intimates, broadly conceived. I also argue that the claims of vulnerable
populations not to be harmed by some forms of brain drain impose moral limits on the
right of states to include. Let me take each in turn.

Refugees
According to the Refugee Convention, refugees are persons who are living outside their
country of citizenship or residence, who have a well-​founded fear of suffering perse-
cution at the hands of their government (or groups supported by their government)
because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or
political opinion (Art. 1A). The Convention thereby answers the conceptual question
of who is a refugee by reference to one specific source of vulnerability: political perse-
cution. However, given that much human displacement is a direct result of state failure,
civil conflict, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and some of the nega-
tive effects associated with climate change, it becomes paramount for liberal states to
acknowledge that there are different sources of vulnerability that push persons outside
their country of citizenship (Betts 2013).
Indeed, most scholars writing on the ethics of asylum have defended more inclusive
definitions of who should count as a refugee. In a very influential 1985 article, Andrew
E. Shacknove already argued that refugees should be seen as “persons whose basic needs
are unprotected by their country of origin, who have no remaining recourse other than
to seek international restitution of their needs, and who are so situated that interna-
tional assistance is possible” (1985: 277). Most recently, political theorists have followed
524   Luara Ferracioli

suit and have redefined the refugee as someone who cannot secure her most fundamen-
tal human rights without migration. David Miller, for instance, argues that the “justice
claim of a refugee stems from the fact that his human rights are currently under threat”
(2015: 395), while Matthew Gibney defines the refugee as someone “who requires the
substitute protection of a new state because their fundamental human rights cannot or
will not be protected by their state of membership or usual residence” (pp. 452–​3).
As becomes clear, scholars have focused on the following considerations when devel-
oping a more inclusive criterion for asylum: (i) some persons cannot reliably count
on their own state of citizenship for the protection or promotion of their fundamental
human rights; (ii) such human right deficits create a stringent duty of assistance on cap-
able members of the international community; and (iii) at times, states can only dis-
charge their duty of assistance by way of inclusion. Taken together, these considerations
give us a more inclusive definition of asylum as well as the broad content of the moral
obligation that goes along with it. It also justifies the negotiation and ratification of a
new Convention—​one that does not focus on political persecution, but rather on the
fact that some persons can only secure their fundamental human rights by becoming
members of another political community (Ferracioli 2014).
At this juncture, two further questions arise with regard to the grounds and content of
the duty of inclusion that correlates with the right to asylum: what is inclusion grounded
in, and how long must it last for?
I started the discussion by assuming that states had a right to control their borders,
but that they were also willing and capable of bringing morality to bear on the design
and implementation of migration arrangements. Moreover, I assumed that in such a
world, states would be in the business of effectively promoting and protecting funda-
mental human rights abroad (see Chapters 22 and 23). Such idealizing assumptions were
not meant to convey that the background conditions of the international system would
be just. On the contrary, I have assumed that the core aspects of international relations
would remain the same. The only idealization here is that liberal states would be capable
of discharging their moral obligations and disposed to do so, and thus in the business of
securing fundamental human rights abroad.
If these assumptions hold, then inclusion will often be grounded in states’ capacity
to assist at moderate cost to their citizens. However, there would still be times when
states would play a causal role in refugee flows by, for instance, engaging in humanitar-
ian intervention or war, or because of past contribution to climate change (Souter 2014).
In those instances, inclusion would be grounded in past contribution to harm, which
would mean that states would be required to bear even higher costs—​i.e. include even
more people—​than if they were simply including refugees as a result of their capacity to
assist at moderate costs to the citizenry.
Finally, let me add that under more ideal conditions, states would always include refu-
gees on a permanent basis. This is because permanent inclusion is the most reliable way
of ensuring that refugees have the resources they need to pursue the sorts of projects and
relationships that give meaning to their lives. Indeed, when states only provide sanctu-
ary until the situation in the refugee’s country of origin has improved, she necessarily
 International Migration and Human Rights    525

lacks knowledge of the site of her overall life plans, and so is not in an adequate position
to pursue important life plans that require long-​term planning. Because it is quite dif-
ficult to make decisions with regard to career, family, and education without knowing
where one’s life will actually take place, there is a strong case for permanent migration
under more ideal conditions (Ferracioli 2014).
Before we discuss the next class of persons who impose moral limits on the right of
states to exclude, let me respond to the concern that there are good expressive and prac-
tical reasons for tying asylum to political persecution, since it allows liberal states to
adequately respond to human rights deficits that arise in poor yet decent states—​the
so-​called “burdened societies” (Rawls 1999). The concern here is that when it comes to
discharging their duties of assistance to citizens of burdened societies, liberal states can
make use of foreign aid rather than asylum, and so can simultaneously communicate
that burdened societies are able to secure the basic interests of their citizens. As Matthew
Price puts it, “citizens of burdened societies lack protection of their basic rights, but
they retain their standing as members. The appropriate stance of outsiders to burdened
societies is to lend assistance, not to condemn their failings” (2009: 73). Matthew Lister
makes a related point by arguing that instead of expanding the definition of who counts
as a refugee, the international community can and should instead adopt a broader read-
ing of the current Refugee Convention (Lister 2013).
I certainly agree that liberal states can typically promote and protect the human rights
of non-​members without making use of migration, and nothing I said above suggests
otherwise. But we should not go as far as to assume that expanding the definition of
refugeehood is not necessary to protect all those in need of protection. After all, there
are all sorts of human rights violations that are not caused by political persecution but
that cannot be adequately addressed without migration (Betts 2013; Ferracioli 2014).
Moreover, while I certainly agree with Lister that employing a more generous reading of
the current Refugee Convention is an appropriate response under non-​ideal conditions,
it still fails to secure the right of asylum in a robust way. As it stands, persons whose
migration claims are not explicitly acknowledged by the Convention are at the mercy of
judges and bureaucrats in a way that is not true of those who suffer political persecution
(Ferracioli 2014). This, however, must change if states are ever to protect all persons who
cannot enjoy their fundamental human rights without migration.

Intimates
In the previous section, I have endorsed the position that liberal states have a duty to
include persons who cannot protect their fundamental human rights without migra-
tion, if states can do so at moderate costs to their citizen (or at higher costs when states
have contributed to their predicament). A second group that imposes limits on the right
of liberal states to exclude is what I will refer to as “intimates.” These are persons who are
in an intimate relationship with a citizen of a liberal state, such as a parent, child, spouse,
relative, or friend.
526   Luara Ferracioli

To begin with, let me grant that liberal states already acknowledge that there are
some kinds of relationships that trigger duties of inclusion. Indeed, liberal states typ-
ically accept that citizens should be able to invite their parents, children, and spouse
to join them as new members of the political community. Moreover, most political
theorists writing on the ethics of immigration see such programmes as legitimately
grounded in the right to freedom of association of citizens, a fundamental canon of
liberal justice (Lister 2010; Wellman and Cole 2011; Blake 2013). Notwithstanding such
theoretical agreements, current family migration schemes fall short of giving equal
consideration to the interests of all citizens in a liberal state, since they fail to pick out
other human relationships that can be equally meaningful and central to people’s lives
(Ferracioli 2016).
Consider friendships. There is no denying that, like many spouses and family mem-
bers, many close friends care for each other deeply and see each other as irreplaceable.
There is also no denying that, like spousal and familial relationships, friendships are
deemed to be objectively valuable by citizens who affirm quite different conceptions of
the good. So if we think that spouses and family members have a right to reside in the
same territory due to the value of their relationship to themselves and to society at large,
then we must think the same of close friends.
But if it is true that non-​formal special relationships could in principle be as valuable
for citizens as the relationships currently acknowledged by family migration schemes,
how do we set them apart from other relationships that do not intuitively give rise to
claims for inclusion, (like the relationship one might have with a neighbour or co-​
worker)? In other work, I have argued that the following conditions are true of valuable
tokens of romantic and familial relationships: (i) those who partake in the relationship
find them quite valuable and so have an interest in enjoying relationship goods that are
territorially located (i.e. living together, setting up a band, helping each other with care
obligations, and so on and so forth); (ii) those who partake in the relationship see the
relationship as irreplaceable due to its historic-​relational properties (that is to say, much
of the value of the relationship springs from its shared history); (iii) the relationship type
is deemed valuable by society at large, and so the imposition of immigration costs on the
citizenry can be justified (Ferracioli 2016).
If I am right that the conditions above give rise to a migration claim on the part of
citizens, irrespective of whether or not there is a legal bond that they can appeal to (i.e.
birth, adoption, or marriage certificates), then a surprising result is that not all spouses
and family members would have a legitimate claim for inclusion. This would be true, for
instance, of spouses who are still legally married but no longer romantically involved,
or of estranged siblings. On the other hand, other intimates whose relationships are not
legally sanctioned by the state could meet all of the conditions above, and so would have
a strong claim to enjoy relationship goods that are territorially located.
At this stage, a few concerns may arise. For one, it might be thought that, unlike famil-
ial and romantic relationships, other kinds of special relationships can be easily pursued
or enjoyed without persons actually finding themselves in the same territory. Another
 International Migration and Human Rights    527

concern is that states are not in a position of looking “into the hearts of citizens,” and
so must instead pick out relationship types by employing the blunter tools of marriage,
adoption, and birth certificates (Lister forthcoming).
In response to the first concern, there is in fact nothing that the liberal states can
appeal to in order to justify the under-​inclusion of family migration schemes with-
out violating state neutrality. For appealing to any feature X traditionally connected to
romantic or familial relationships (i.e. sex, procreative parenting, biological connection,
financial dependency, etc.), the liberal states will inevitably communicate that certain
kinds of romantic and familial relationships are more valuable than others. This would
grate against the basic liberal requirement that the state must remain sufficiently neutral
among competing conceptions of the good (see Ferracioli 2016).
In response to the second concern, I would grant that the liberal state must, at times,
make use of more objective criteria that might imperfectly track the morally relevant
features in a particular case. However, in the case of family migration schemes, there
are in fact feasible and permissible strategies that would allow bureaucrats to assess the
existence of a special relationship without recourse to the blunter tools of legal certifi-
cates. What I have in mind are personal correspondence, interviews, testimony, photos,
and any other evidence that can be gathered with the explicit consent of those making a
migration claim. The important point here is that any agreed loss of privacy that would
arise under more inclusive family migration schemes can be justified by the fact that
they would be superior to current schemes in recognizing that an array of relationships
give meaning to people’s lives.

Vulnerable Populations
In the previous sections we examined the moral claims that limit the scope of the right
of liberal states to exclude. In this section, we look at how the harmful effects of certain
kinds of skill-​based migration impose limits on the scope of the right to include. The
idea here is that there will be persons who should be excluded if liberal states are to bring
morality fully to bear on their migration arrangements.
To begin with, let me grant that much of skill-​based migration referred to as “brain
drain” is not problematic, all things considered. Often, the negative effects associated
with the departure of skilled immigrants are adequately compensated for, or outweighed
by countervailing benefits typically associated with migration (i.e. lower unemploy-
ment rates, remittances, savings, and knowledge transferral). However, at times, the
departure of skilled immigrants directly contributes to a state of affairs where vulner-
able populations in developing countries find themselves unable to enjoy the protection
and promotion of their fundamental human rights (Brock 2009). This is because some
professional skills are not only necessary for the provision of essential services such as
health care and education but also non-​substitutable for other skills and resources and
non-​shareable across borders (Ferracioli 2015).
528   Luara Ferracioli

In light of the distinction between skilled-​based migration that contributes to human

rights deficits (henceforth: harmful brain drain) and skill-​based migration that is either
unproblematic or, all things considered, beneficial, we can now see why skill-​based
migration can, at times, impose moral limits on the scope of the right to include. After
all, there are times where the emigration of high numbers of skilled workers contrib-
utes to human rights deficits that cannot be adequately compensated for or mitigated by
the benefits associated with skill-​based migration, no matter how great. Such scenarios
arise when educators, doctors, and nurses departure from countries where the ratio of
workers in the population is already below or at the exact threshold required for the
adequate provision of essential services.2
So what follows from the fact that skill-​based migration can, at times, make it harder
for vulnerable persons to enjoy access to their fundamental human rights? Given that
states should not to contribute to (i.e. initiate, sustain, or enable) any causal chain or
process that will foreseeably lead to human deprivation at the international level, they
should not include immigrants coming from countries where their skills are necessary
for the provision of essential services.
More specifically, liberal states must exclude prospective immigrants when the fol-
lowing two conditions are met: (i) it is foreseen (or should be foreseen) that skill-​based
migration will bring about or exacerbate harm in the form of human rights deficits
(when the ratios of professionals to the overall population are such that migration will
render vulnerable populations less able to access an adequate level of essential services);
and (ii) when there are decently paid jobs that are sufficiently attractive to prospective
skilled immigrants so that they can adequately employ their professional skills if they do
not emigrate.3
Let me now respond to a couple of objections. First, it could be argued that lib-
eral states lack legitimacy to impose justice abroad and so should not expect skilled
immigrants to address human rights deficits in their countries of origin when liberal
states themselves lack a sound record of acting effectively to secure the human rights
of vulnerable populations. Second, it could be argued that liberal states lack the neces-
sary knowledge to avoid enabling harmful brain drain, and so cannot have a duty to
exclude prospective immigrants when the above conditions are met. Let me take each
in turn.
In an influential discussion of immigration restriction on brain drain grounds,
Kieran Oberman has argued that whether or not affluent states have the right to exclude
prospective skilled immigrants in order to protect vulnerable populations depends on
whether they have the legitimacy to impose justice abroad. As he puts it, “when rich
states fail to fulfill their own duties towards the global poor, but nevertheless enforce
the duties of skilled workers, they exhibit toward the skilled workers a form of disres-
pect: they are forcing others to act in a way that they are not prepared to act themselves”
(2013: 449).
However, if my view is correct, Oberman’s way of stating the responsibility of recipi-
ent states misrepresents the morally salient features of the case. As I see it, liberal states
should exclude prospective immigrants on brain drain grounds not because they are
 International Migration and Human Rights    529

trying to impose justice abroad, but because they have a moral responsibility not to con-
tribute to a causal chain that foreseeably contributes to human rights deficits among
vulnerable populations in the developing world (Barry and Øverland 2012). Oberman’s
legitimacy condition leads to the implausible result that states must assist vulnerable
populations before they are morally entitled to refrain from harming them. (I take it that
it would be equally implausible to claim that individuals must donate to charity before
they are morally entitled to buy fair trade products.)
As for the question of knowledge, there is sufficient evidence available for liberal states
with regard to the consequences of conferring the benefit of immigration to skilled
workers on a large scale when they bring with them skills that are urgently needed and
could be effectively utilized in their countries of origin. It is therefore hard to deny that
states know, or at least should know, that by ignoring inadequate ratios of worker within
populations in the developing world, they enable and therefore contribute to harm in
those countries.

Motivational and Institutional

Constraints

In the previous section, I argued that liberal states have strong duties of inclusion and
exclusion. However, I also granted that states are motivated primarily by prudential rea-
sons when it comes to the design and implementation of their migration arrangements.
But why is it that states lack the motivation to ensure that their migration arrange-
ments comply with the demands of liberal cosmopolitanism? One plausible source of
motivation (or lack thereof) is the state’s level of commitment to the emerging inter-
national human rights regime. Not all states are equally committed to human rights, but
there are good reasons for thinking that human rights practice is becoming stronger,
and to remain optimistic that human rights discourse will be even more likely to motiv-
ate moral action by states in the future (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). Another source
of motivation within a certain domain is the existence and strength of the international
institutional framework under which states operate (Finnemore 1996).
In light of the fact that international arrangements can positively affect the level of
motivation on the part of states when it comes to discharging their prior moral obliga-
tions, I believe that states a have a stringent duty to create a new UN agency for migra-
tion so that they are more likely to discharge their strong duties of migration in the
future. Indeed, a new, well-​funded migration agency would play important expressive
and practical roles.
With regard to its expressive role, such an agency would communicate to the inter-
national community that, although states have a right to exclude, the exercise of that
right is constrained by a number of stringent moral obligations (in the same way that
the World Health Organization (WHO) enables the international community to
530   Luara Ferracioli

communicate that although member-​states are free to implement their own health care
programmes, some heath concerns are global in scope and demand joint international
action).
As for its practical role, this new agency could facilitate compliance with the duty to
exclude by giving states clear guidance about the citizenship and skills of workers who
should not be included until there is an adequate ratio of workers in the population of
their country of origin. Most importantly, this agency could encourage states to align
their response to refugees with the broader human rights regime, by urging states to
adopt a human-​rights based interpretation of the current convention (at least, until
there is sufficient political support for the ratification of a more inclusive one). And of
course, such an agency would be well equipped to facilitate burden-​sharing of refugees
by states, as well as create the condition for a refugee trading scheme if states could show
that such a scheme is both morally permissible and likely to be effective in significantly
increasing the numbers of persons in receipt of protection.

Conclusion

I now want to conclude this discussion by showing that a more desirable immigra-
tion regime is also reasonably feasible. This is because the creation of a new migration
agency is itself reasonably feasible. Indeed, there are already two international organ-
izations that partly foster international cooperation in the domain of migration: the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International
Organization for Migration (IOM). While these agencies already enable some degree
of international cooperation in migration, there are shortcomings in relying on them as
they currently function.
The problem with the UNHCR is its scope. Its mandate has always been temporary
(although recurring refugee flows have meant that the agency’s mandate continues to
be extended), and its focus is not on migration per se but on refugees as determined
by the Refugee Convention. The problem with the IOM relates to its legal status, rather
than the scope of its work. This intergovernmental organization (which is not part of the
United Nations system) is involved in a wide range of issues related to the global man-
agement of migration, but it lacks a legal mandate to enable proper collective action by
states. This means that the agency’s focus is limited to service provision, research, and
policy advice.
Given that we already have two well-​structured, truly international agencies that
either possesses some of the expertise needed for cooperation or the legitimacy to pro-
tect the vulnerable, the international community should merge the two organizations
into a proper, well-​funded UN agency. This agency could be labelled United Nations
Organization for Migration (UNOM), entrusted with the appropriate legal mandate
and institutional apparatus to ensure that the right of liberal states to pursue their own
 International Migration and Human Rights    531

migration arrangements is properly constrained by their moral duties of inclusion and

exclusion.

Notes
1. Pevnick (2011) and Carens (2013) are exceptions.
2. e.g. the emigration of two-thirds of South African physicians has exacerbated the South
African HIV and the tuberculosis epidemics. See Chopra et al. (2009). See also El-​Khawas
(2004).
3. Similar conditions are defended in Ferracioli (2015). Let me grant that there may be genuine
uncertainty in some domestic contexts, and that it will be appropriate for states to continue
including workers until it becomes clear that they are indeed enabling harmful brain drain.

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 ­c hapter 40

Clim ate Equ i t y i n

the Real Worl d

Steve Vanderheiden

Delegates to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro dared to challenge conventional
thinking about the role of normative ideals in international politics, calling upon the
world’s nation-​states to embrace ideals of global equity and responsibility in a series of
landmark environmental treaties, including the Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD), Agenda 21, and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. But
none cast the challenges of international cooperation on behalf of environmental pro-
tection in such overtly ethical terms as the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), through which 192 signatory states pledged to “protect the
climate system for the benefit of current and future generations, on the basis of equity
and the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” of state
parties to the convention (Art. 3, principle 1). This reference to international burden-​
sharing informed by equity and common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR)
is widely viewed as seeking to advance international or global justice in two crucial
respects: that its efforts are deployed against an environmental problem that is primarily
understood in terms of the unjust burdens it would otherwise impose, and in its insist-
ence that remedial actions be guided by equity principles to ensure that other injust-
ices are narrowed rather than widened through efforts to rectify or lessen the original
injustice.
Over two decades later, with the failure to extend legally binding and centrally set
mitigation burdens upon the 2012 expiration of the Kyoto Protocol, some have come to
fault this emphasis upon equity in burden-​sharing as well as procedural justice for what
is regarded as the failure to adequately realize the climate convention’s imperatives. In its
insistence upon inclusive and democratic participation by state parties, with its consen-
sus rule providing a universal veto, and in its focus upon generating an equitable agree-
ment that is also suitably ambitious, the UNFCCC process could in hindsight be viewed
as having been set up to fail under the weight of unrealistic expectations. Had these
lofty substantive goals somehow been met through the egalitarian decision-​making
534   Steve Vanderheiden

processes of the climate convention, the realist scepticism about the role of ideals in
international politics would have been decisively impugned, as this would have dem-
onstrated the capacity of international institutions to realize the ends of justice while
also abiding by its means. Demonstrating its possibility, in turn, might have vindicated
its desirability, potentially reshaping analysis in international relations for decades, and
raising the bar for other international cooperative agreements.
But those goals have not clearly been met. Even with the Paris Agreement at COP-​21 in
late 2015, meeting the diminished expectations for a new multilateral climate treaty and
salvaging the consensus rule at the expense of burden-​sharing according to the CBDR
principle and legally binding commitments, considerable scepticism remains among
realists about the feasibility (see Chapter 48) of core commitments to inclusive decision-​
making processes and equitable outcomes in international politics. Climate justice
imperatives that aim for a more equitable sharing of the planet’s atmospheric absorptive
capacity have been replaced by more modest aims of an “international Paretianism” in
which such imperatives are taken to entail that “states only enter treaties that serve their
interests” (Posner and Weisbach 2015: 6), and in which it is assumed that the pursuit
of more substantive equity in international burden-​sharing has hindered rather than
motivated agreement on core objectives. Such scepticism challenges the aspiration
toward international cooperation through multilateral treaties and the construction of
new environmental regimes in advancing a more ambitious and normatively defensible
version of global justice (see Chapters 9 and 50)—​or at least reducing its contributions
to global injustice—​as not only politically infeasible but also normatively unnecessary.
Several outcomes from COP-​21 warrant such a sceptical assessment. State parties
to the Paris Agreement agreed to establish non-​binding “nationally determined con-
tributions” (NDCs) toward international mitigation goals, rather than legally binding
targets, along with a framework for registering, monitoring, and upgrading these com-
mitments. Abandoning the more rigorous CBDR principle by which the allocation of
state burdens could be equitably assigned in favour of “self-​differentiation” by states,
the earlier emphasis upon equitable differentiation of national mitigation responsibil-
ities appears to have been diminished in the interests of political expedience. While 189
of 195 signatory states committed to post-​2020 mitigation actions, these non-​binding
pledges are not answerable to equity criteria in their evaluation, and are insufficient to
meet the 2 °C temperature target, suggesting that earlier objectives concerning inter-
generational equity have yet to find support in outcomes of the agreement. Finally, the
annex system, by which parties in developed countries were differentiated from those
in developing countries in their mitigation commitments, was abandoned prior to
the Paris Agreement and not revived with it. For those advocating a focus upon and
strengthening of top-​down national differentiation as vital to the CBDR equity formula
for mitigation, these outcomes represent a retreat from some equity provisions of the
Kyoto Protocol rather than a remedy to its shortcomings.
On the other hand, one might identify several manifestations of a clear and ongoing
commitment to equity principles in the Paris Agreement, despite the absence of legally
binding national mitigation burdens assigned in accordance with equity principles of
 Climate Equity in the Real World    535

the kind called for by climate justice scholars and advocates. Parties affirmed the goal
of holding global temperature increases “well below” the 2 °C temperature target set at
COP-​16 in Cancun, and agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rise to
1.5 °C, thereby committing to levels of ambition in global mitigation efforts insisted
upon by less developed and more vulnerable states, and pledging further to align cli-
mate finance flows with this goal. The decision not to revive the annex system is more
plausibly viewed as clearing obstacles to universal participation in mitigation efforts and
as arising from recognition that major emitters like China had outgrown their exemp-
tions from mitigation imperatives, rather than as abandoning national differentiation
in mitigation commitments altogether. While NDCs are not differentiated according to
the equity formulae favoured by climate justice scholars, neither were the legally bind-
ing Kyoto commitments, and the flexibility of this bottom-​up approach is expected to
encourage greater ambition in those commitments, serving interests in intergenera-
tional equity. Finally, commitments to international equity are on display in the climate
finance provisions of the Paris Agreement, which extends the earlier commitment of
mobilizing $100 billion per year from 2020 to 2025, and signals the need to shift finan-
cial resources away from fossil fuels and toward renewable and sustainable energy as
well as low-​carbon development if temperature targets are to be met.
It may therefore be premature to cite the UNFCCC process in announcing the death
of ambitious idealism in international politics, but neither that process nor its latest out-
come can be definitively cited on behalf of its triumph. Perhaps the final chapter of this
international policy development process—​with post-​2023 targets and commitments
either demonstrating adequate progress toward climate justice objectives or failing to
do so—​will allow for more meaningful assessment of whether or not the commitments
to substantive and procedural equity within the UNFCCC helped or hindered its prac-
tical goals; but that chapter has not yet been written. At issue for the remainder of this
analysis is whether the failure at COP-​21 to deliver on the demand for a fully equitable
mitigation and adaptation policy architecture bolsters the sceptical case against incor-
porating equity principles into international treaties, or illustrates the benefits of pur-
suing but failing to fully achieve ambitious idealistic objectives. Against the view that
commitments to equity have only obstructed the international climate policy devel-
opment process, I shall contend that aspirations toward equity have focused attention
upon subjects and issues that might otherwise have been ignored and have served a
legitimizing function within the climate regime.

Challenges for Equity

in International Climate Politics

To be fair, the UNFCCC process faced a daunting challenge. In contrast to the remit
of the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of ozone-​depleting chlorofluorocarbons
536   Steve Vanderheiden

in the handful of industrialized countries that relied upon them, and then with a read-
ily available substitute to reduce industry opposition, the task of phasing out fossil
fuels throughout the world is immensely more difficult. Entrenched economic inter-
ests among fossil fuel-​exporting states and carbon-​intensive industries have galvanized
opposition among powerful veto holders against any ambitious mitigation programme,
whether in international politics or internally within most major participating nation-​
states. The high cost and technical difficulty in converting to low-​carbon energy and
transport systems among high carbon-​consuming states has likely tempered enthusi-
asm for more ambitious agreements. While the Montreal Protocol is widely considered
to be a successful cooperative effort in international environmental politics, the larger
number of parties needing to agree and the far higher economic stakes in the climate
agreement raise its difficulty by orders of magnitude. That climate treaty efforts have not
seen the success of the ozone-​protecting Protocol can almost entirely be attributed to
this greater challenge, not to the waning of idealism or any decline in the willingness to
engage in risky cooperation on behalf of the global environment.
Despite complicating the processes of reaching agreement, the commitment to equity
in outcomes and participation through the UNFCCC process offers an instructive case
of how an ambitious idealism in international relations can raise expectations for, and
even advance, its declared ideals, even if policy outcomes ultimately fail to fully realize
them. That the UNFCCC process has failed to fully realize its declared ideals represents
not a final judgement of its potential but an assessment of its progress thus far, and may
change as countries meet or exceed their decarbonization and adaptation finance com-
mitments, then renew these in view of progress toward or regress from global tempera-
ture targets in the 2023 “global stocktake” and in view of new technological and social
pathways to low-​carbon societies. My claim that the UNFCCC’s idealism might none-
theless be constructive for future environmental agreements relies upon the assessment
(for which I will argue below) that its embrace of equity and inclusion were not only
morally laudable but also essential to its achieved intermediate and (prospects for) final
successes, and pose less of an obstacle to that success than some critics of the process
have claimed.
The UNFCCC process, along with the substance of the Paris Agreement, could be
characterized as a failure in at least three crucial respects. First and most obviously, it
has failed to yield an agreement by which global greenhouse gas emissions might be
brought under sufficient and effective controls necessary for meeting its identified glo-
bal temperature target, with further increases in atmospheric concentrations of those
gases halted or reversed. Second, it has failed to bring about the kind of structural trans-
formation within the world’s energy and transportation infrastructure that could make
a more ambitious global treaty feasible, largely focusing instead, up to the present, upon
the low-​hanging fruit of short-​term emissions reductions and the creation of mar-
kets. Third, the process has resulted in little progress toward consensus around equity
goals themselves, with the prospect of including equity-​based benchmarks or pro-
cesses within a new treaty no greater (and perhaps worse) than in previous decades. The
Paris Agreement notwithstanding, many view this process as inadequate to the task of
 Climate Equity in the Real World    537

bringing about any effective global mitigation programme, much less an equitable one.
The question is not whether the UNFCCC process has failed in these ways, but whether
and how its declared equity commitments either contributed to this failure or mitigated
pressures toward more inequitable outcomes up to now and may yet help to rectify those
shortcomings in the future.

The Role of Equity Commitments in

the UNFCCC Impasse

Some critics have identified the UNFCCC’s commitment to equity in the assignment of
mitigation burdens, along with its inclusiveness and procedural equality, as responsible
for the ongoing impasse over equitable and legally binding decarbonization commit-
ments. Prior to the negotiation of the Paris Agreement, Posner and Weisbach (2015: 4)
claimed that continuing emphases upon promoting equity through climate treaty nego-
tiations “threaten to derail a climate change agreement, thus hurting most the nations
and people who are pressing those very arguments.” They therefore urged the reframing
of the UNFCCC’s equity objectives in terms of national interests, around which they
seek to repackage climate justice discourses, if they are to yield agreement. Similarly,
in her post-​mortem of the “failure” of the Kyoto Protocol, Rosen (2015: 45) identifies
that treaty’s “use of percentage-​based, net emissions targets” as responsible for opening
intractable rifts between states over their burden-​sharing arrangements, which aimed to
instantiate some version of the CBDR principle, along with the relatively short compli-
ance period in which the structural changes to energy and transport systems needed for
serious decarbonization could not realistically occur.
Other critics identify procedural elements of the UNFCCC as responsible for the glo-
bal impasse. Streck (2012) faults the consensus rule for undermining prospects for wide
agreement by allowing any party to veto and thus obstruct the climate treaty’s develop-
ment. Keohane and Victor (2011: 9) cite the complexity of the global mitigation chal-
lenge and uncertainties surrounding future gains and risks as elements of the “regime
complex” of climate change that renders states “increasingly unable to make reliable
promises about exactly what they will be willing and able to implement.” As a result, they
argue, parties are now even more reluctant to make ambitious commitments through
the inclusive processes and “massive, integrated legal instruments and global summits
such as witnessed in Copenhagen” (Streck 2012: 14). Hoffman (2011) blames a misguided
but stubbornly ongoing commitment to what he calls “megamultilateralism” for the fail-
ure of the UNFCCC process, even well after such an approach has, in his view, demon-
strated its inability to yield satisfactory results.
Many such critics call either for the abandonment of the UNFCCC process altogether
or for the temporary redirecting of energies toward more limited and modest goals
through which some of the convention’s objectives might be more successfully realized.
538   Steve Vanderheiden

Keohane and Victor (2001: 9), for example, endorse the “climate clubs” approach of
crafting agreements among relatively small groups of large emitters, which are “easier
to manage because they are smaller” and can “allow members to withhold benefits from
states that do not share their interests or seek to act as free riders.” Similarly, Widerberg
and Pattberg (2015: 45) call for the development of more International Cooperative
Initiatives (ICIs) that “operate beyond the auspices of the UNFCCC” and include
“smaller groups of likeminded countries, often including companies, NGOs, aca-
demia, international organizations (IO) and sub-​national public actors such as cities.”
Such efforts, they argue, could both initiate the necessary decarbonization efforts for
closing emissions gaps and help to create the political support needed for more ambi-
tious multilateral agreements. Likewise, Heyward (2007: 259) calls for more “bottom-​
up” approaches involving clean energy research and development, efficiency standards,
and the redirection of subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, suggesting that these
nonbinding approaches “have the potential to be perceived as reasonably equitable, and
could be environmentally effective if they attract sufficient support.”
None of these critics views the UNFCCC process as being potentially constructive
for suitably ambitious cooperative international climate agreements in the future. All
identify the commitments to equity articulated in the framework convention as posing
obstacles rather than fostering agreement or motivating cooperation. Whether in terms
of expectations of global equity or responsibility-​based mitigation burden-​sharing or
as reflected in the highly inclusive processes by which states large and small, rich and
poor, carbon-​profligate and climate-​vulnerable alike, have not only a voice but also an
effective veto, they view the convention’s idealistic commitments as a practical nuisance,
despite perhaps also morally laudable goals. While levelled prior to the negotiation of
the Paris Agreement, each of these points of criticism could be cited in its wake insofar
as there is no clear equity criteria by which to evaluate national mitigation targets, or
assign and/​or evaluate equitable climate finance burden among developed countries for
the purposes of funding mitigation and adaptation in developing countries. Does such
criticism warrant rethinking the place of equity in international environmental agree-
ments, as doing more harm than good?

Equity Ideals as Constructive,

but Elusive

Most of the criticism levelled against the UNFCCC process has been directed at its com-
mitments to procedural equity, in its inclusiveness and with the consensus rule, rather
than at its commitment to equity in outcomes. Indeed, while various historical instan-
tiations of this equity commitment may be open to criticism as inequitable in other
respects, or later became obstacles to further process in climate treaty negotiations, they
have nonetheless served to move the process forward rather than hindering it at crucial
 Climate Equity in the Real World    539

times. Although it has come to be viewed as an obstacle to the full participation of rap-
idly growing emitters like India and China, for example, the earlier interpretation of
the CBDR principle as requiring the division of state parties into Annex 1 industrial-
ized countries with legally binding targets under the Kyoto protocol and non-​Annex 1
developing ones without such commitments served to reduce obstacles to participation
by allowing crucial developing-​country parties to benefit from international carbon-​
trading and other mitigation programmes. As previously noted, the Paris Agreement
no longer utilizes the annex system to differentiate states into categories of industrial-
ized parties with mitigation and developing ones without: the binary distinction was
scrapped at COP-​20 in Lima the previous year, as outdated and unnecessary. Instead,
the Paris Agreement calls on all parties to “aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse
gas emissions as soon as possible” (Art. 4.1), instructing developed countries to “con-
tinue taking the lead” in their domestic mitigation efforts while providing support for
developing countries to do the same. In so doing, it allows for finer-​grained differenti-
ation among developing country parties, rather than relying upon the crude binary by
which all non-​Annex 1 parties were treated equally.
The decision in the Kyoto Protocol to grandfather the widely disparate per cap-
ita emissions by calling for roughly equal percentage reductions in emissions among
developed-​country parties invited criticism about its failure to follow the CBDR prin-
ciple (Vanderheiden 2008), even if allowing this inequity to persist fostered consensus
over its terms by requiring slightly less of the United States than was required of the
European Union, where political support for mitigation was substantially higher. Here,
the commitment to procedural equity allowed a powerful state to exact inequitable out-
comes from its veto threat, as procedures requiring the agreement of powerful states
were also used to include carbon offsetting and trading as compliance mechanisms
within the protocol. However, the equity language in the UNFCCC pressured the US to
reframe its objections to the treaty framework in terms of equity, as it did in claiming as
inequitable the exclusion of India and China from binding commitments, rather than
exclusively citing national interests for its refusal to ratify and later withdrawal from the
Protocol.
More recently, the consensus rule has come to be used to advance developing-​country
interests rather than as a veto threat benefiting affluent states, aligning procedural
equity commitments like the consensus rule with substantive equity objectives for pol-
icy outcomes. The walk-​out by 132 developing countries at COP-​19 in Warsaw resulted
in the acknowledgement of “loss and damage” recompense as a “red line” for maintain-
ing some equity commitments within the treaty architecture, and in the initiation of
the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage. Likewise, the insertion into
the 9 December Draft Paris Outcome of language calling upon rich countries to pay the
“agreed full costs” (Option 1 under Art. III, §5) of mitigation plans, combined with pres-
sure from India and China to include climate finance commitments within the treaty
framework, led to a ramping up of such commitments to secure consensus behind the
Paris Agreement, with the quantified goal of $100 billion per year included in the text
(§54). Similarly, the advocacy of a 1.5 °C rather than 2 °C temperature goal by the High
540   Steve Vanderheiden

Ambition Coalition, led by the Marshall Islands, allowed a relatively powerless party to
leverage the need for consensus to gain official recognition of this more ambitious target
within the Paris Agreement. In these cases, the political equality inherent in the consen-
sus rule has led to more equitable burden-​sharing rather than less.
Indeed, the treaty’s early and continued commitment to equity may be considered as
among its greatest strengths, and as an essential component to its success. As Morgan
and Waskow note, “equity and mitigation ambition are two sides of the same coin”
(2014: 20), since the collective action nature of global climate politics makes it easier
for any one state to commit to more ambitious abatement targets if others also do so,
negating any comparative disadvantages from taking on those commitments. Inequity,
as Parks and Roberts (2008: 623) suggest,

can dampen utility-​enhancing cooperative efforts by reinforcing “structuralist”

world-​views and causal beliefs, polarizing policy preferences, making it difficult to
coalesce around a socially shared understanding of what is “fair”, eroding conditions
of trust, generating divergent and unstable expectations about future behaviour, and
creating incentives for zero-​sum and negative-​sum behaviour.

Apart from the need to address perceived inequities as a precondition for agreement
to the terms of any climate treaty, commitments to equity within the process and in the
outcomes of international climate treaties may be essential for fostering the necessary
conditions for those policy-​making processes being approached in a cooperative spirit
with the requisite trust and reciprocity, and their resulting commitments being pursued
with good faith. Likewise, the need to reach consensus motivates concessions to the
interests of poor and vulnerable parties by powerful ones, furthering equity objectives
through the pragmatic need for agreement joined to the UNFCCC process’s commit-
ments to inclusivity and political equality.
In turn, equity interests might be better served by a more inclusive and multilateral
framework rather than through piecemeal or club-​based approaches, through which
some states must initiate their decarbonization efforts well before others or in which
many states are exempt from binding commitments altogether. In the absence of an
international treaty framework, it may be incumbent upon some states to unilaterally
take the lead in mitigation efforts, in an attempt to lead other states toward more equit-
able forms of cooperation. Those states acting upon early commitments face higher per-​
unit abatement costs, at least insofar as these are driven by adoption of more efficient
technology, as early adopters face higher costs and thus face less efficient abatement
options than might later adopters (Vanderheiden 2012). As Maltais suggests (2014: 627),
this need not necessarily undermine equitable terms of cooperation, as the “costs
of leadership” many still involve “burdens for which we can appropriately assign fair
shares.” Incentives to take on early adopter costs could be built into the later assignment
of mitigation burdens, to reflect this differential in per-​unit abatement costs between
early and late adopters of technology; but such leadership still exposes those taking the
lead to more risk and uncertainty, which involve their own inequitable burdens.
 Climate Equity in the Real World    541

By contrast, the risks can be more evenly distributed, the uncertainties reduced
and their insidious effects upon particular states prevented, and the development and
deployment costs for clean technologies more evenly borne under a treaty framework
under which similarly positioned parties undertake mitigation efforts simultaneously.
More inclusive efforts also prevent free-​riding, which can likewise impose inequitable
burdens upon cooperators while also discouraging their taking on more ambitious
commitments for fear of these being undermined by those refusing to make such com-
mitments (Vanderheiden 2016). Whereas the club approach may help to jump-​start
international mitigation efforts where multilateral treaty processes are stymied by con-
flict (Grasso and Roberts 2014), by leaving out minor emitters and defectors they allow
for significant inequities in mitigation burdens, which may act as a counterweight to
the expediency benefits touted by advocates. As Eckersley notes (2012: 33), an “exclusive
minilateralism,” in which vulnerable parties are excluded from negotiations because
of their negligible emissions, would “remove an important source of information and
advocacy for strong action on mitigation” and remove “the answerability of the major
emitters to the most vulnerable parties during the crucial negotiation phase.” Only by
including the most vulnerable in negotiations through an “inclusive minilateralism” can
this ambition and accountability be restored, she suggests. Here, answerability to the
vulnerable should also promote greater equity, within and between generations, as the
agreement must be fair to a wider group of participants.

Equity and Ambition in Real-​World

Climate Efforts

While critics correctly identify a gap between the equity goals articulated through the
UNFCCC and their operationalization in international agreements or realization in
practice, justice has not disappeared as a guiding principle, as Posner and Weisbach
urged. Since the international climate regime inherently addresses justice issues in its
remit (Soltau 2009), and given the attention at COP-​21 to higher levels of ambition in
mitigation, to ramping up adaptation finance, and to officially addressing issues of “loss
and damage” within the agreement, the resilience and continuing influence of an equity
discourse in the international climate policy development process portends its staying
power. Indeed, the very notion that an equity gap exists between expectations and real-
ity implies that the former continues to condition and offer critical perspective on the
latter. As norms, justice and equity are rarely fully realized within institutional arrange-
ments, but can have critical force on policy outcomes nonetheless, as they highlight
areas in which practice falls short of such ideals.
Those calling for procedural reforms of or alternatives to the laborious and often
deadlocked UNFCCC process, or for de-​emphasizing or even forswearing its commit-
ments to equitable outcomes, typically do so from a frustrated pragmatism, regarding a
542   Steve Vanderheiden

misguided pursuit of the perfect as having become an enemy of the good. Certainly, they
have a point in claiming that some progress at decarbonization or adaptation finance
is better than none, and that some inequity in remedial burden-​sharing in an effect-
ive mitigation effort now would be preferable, from the perspective of intergenerational
equity, to business as usual. Less often appreciated are the ways that two and a half dec-
ades of framing climate change as in large part an equity imperative have placed and
kept the issue on the agenda of social justice and development movements that might
otherwise have viewed it as less pressing, or motivated more ambitious commitments
from developing country parties to the convention, which have become active and inter-
ested if subordinate parties to its development. That the US Senate, in refusing to ratify
the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and its president, George W. Bush, in withdrawing from the
treaty, felt compelled to justify these economically and ideologically motivated rejec-
tions of international cooperation in terms of fairness or equity should not be underesti-
mated. Equity offers a powerful discursive frame for international politics, and its power
is not diminished by the gaps between what it commends and what it observes.
In casting the human causes and effects of climate change in justice terms, and in
requiring attention to procedural and substantive equity in the international response to
it, the framework convention could aptly be described as morally ambitious. That is, by
framing this immensely complicated environmental phenomenon as in significant part
a justice problem—​while also being a social, economic, technological, and ecological
problem—​it constrains the remedies available for addressing its various other dimen-
sions. In requiring that mitigation and adaptation efforts not only be effective but also
equitable, it rules out as contrary to its core principle some more expeditious approaches
that could have bypassed the “megamultilateral” processes of the UNFCCC. Some crit-
ics now identify that moral ambition as having caused the limitations of, and resulting
impasse over, key issues in those processes, suggesting abandonment of some or all of
its guiding principles, but in so doing fail to appreciate how commitments to substan-
tive and procedural equity have been instrumental in shaping a treaty framework that
is acceptable to all parties. Absent these equity commitments within the UNFCCC pro-
cess, and equity provisions within the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, the treaty
frameworks would not have been acceptable to key parties, and agreement upon their
terms would not have been possible.
While such calls for reform are controversial among observers of UNFCCC climate
policy development processes, less controversial is the assessment that the policy out-
comes and resulting actions associated with them have not been practically ambitious
enough. This kind of ambition is reflected in pledges toward, actions on behalf of, and
results from national mitigation plans, along with state pledges for and delivery of funds
to adaptation-​financing mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. As has been widely
noted elsewhere, the pledged mitigation actions called for in the Paris Agreement are
expected to fall well short of what is necessary for maintaining the 2 °C temperature
target that was also affirmed at the same meeting, and the mobilization of international
climate finance through mechanisms like the GCF and Global Environmental Facility
have likewise thus far been insufficient to meet the politically declared objectives for
 Climate Equity in the Real World    543

these instruments. Such deficits in practical ambition are only apparent because of the
UNFCCC’s moral ambition in charging parties with explicitly ethical objectives and
directing them to follow idealistic criteria in doing so, and because procedural equity
commitments led to the adoption of temperature targets by which national mitigation
commitments could be assessed as revealing a gap. Faulting the UNFCCC process’s
moral ambition for the gap between its stated ideals and objectives and the performance
of states in meeting those ideals and objectives fails to appreciate how the moral ambi-
tion enhances rather than inhibits the practical ambition.

Conclusion

Going forward, the question that will determine the success or failure of international
climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts is therefore how to significantly
increase their level of practical ambition. Whether an excess of moral ambition has
helped or hindered this practical ambition in the past, and whether an increase or reduc-
tion of moral ambition in the future might translate into greater practical ambition,
therefore form crucial aspects of this question. Ultimately, these are empirical questions
about which several of the outcomes discussed above offer some anecdotal evidence, but
which nonetheless are largely speculative and uncertain, given the untestable hypoth-
eses on both sides. Lurking behind this empirical question lies a normative one, which
has proved equally difficult to adequately address within the field of international pol-
itical theory. If we stipulate that this trade-​off between moral and practical ambition is
possible, we must still ask whether it is defensible to sacrifice global justice for the sake
of better environmental outcomes.
One answer to this normative question suggests that this would be defensible, since
the environmental conditions are foundational for social or global justice to be possible,
and the impacts upon the world’s poor by inadequately mitigated climate change would
be so severe that no prior insistence upon equity in mitigation or adaptation efforts
could possibly undo the damage. Notice that here, as with Posner and Weisbach’s call
to eschew the justice discourse within international climate negotiations, the struggle
for justice is viewed as self-​defeating, maintaining that the best way to promote global
equity is to set aside concerns about global equity. While tempting in its endorsement of
a kind of moral laissez-​faire, its facile presumption—​that a global economic system that
has allowed for widening inequalities despite a four decade-​long campaign to end global
poverty, or a climate system that has thus far benefited the world’s advantaged by allow-
ing carbon-​intensive development while threatening the world’s most disadvantaged in
its predicted impacts, will yield greater equity if not intentionally directed to do so—​
constitutes an unwarranted wager on the welfare of those most vulnerable to injustice as
well as environmental change.
A more precautionary answer, and the one urged in this chapter’s analysis, doubts
the empirical trade-​off but flatly rejects the normative one. Insofar as climate change
544   Steve Vanderheiden

is at its core a problem of justice—​with inherently distributive questions about access

to the world’s carbon sinks and fairness in the allocation of mitigation and adaptation
burdens—​it cannot be fully redressed by setting aside equity, as some critics suggest. If
anything, it will be concern for equity in the impacts of climate change, upon the poor
and vulnerable that have done so little to contribute to the problem but stand to bear the
brunt of its effects, and upon future generations about which the same can be said, that
will motivate higher levels of practical ambition among political leaders in the global
North. National interests alone, especially with the discounting of future national inter-
ests, will not be enough to motivate mitigation actions sufficient to meet the 2 °C tem-
perature target, or to provide necessary adaptation resources for those beyond national
borders who are placed in harm’s way. It is this moral ambition, then, and the motives
and resources that it might potentially mobilize on behalf of more practical ambition
in global climate efforts, that have fostered agreement on more equitable and ambitious
outcomes that might otherwise have found their way into the Paris Agreement, and
which may yet salvage the UNFCCC process.

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 ­c hapter 41

The Eth i c a l
Foundations of A i d
Two Duties of Rescue

Paul Collier

Over the past half-​century, aid to “developing” countries has grown to be big money,
financed through taxation and delivered through a plethora of government and phil-
anthropic organizations. Yet its ethical underpinnings have received surprisingly little
attention. I suggest that the ethical rationale for tax-​financed aid should ultimately be
grounded in certain obligations to other human beings which are widely recognized by
ordinary people. Unless aid meets such obligations, the resort to compulsory taxation
to finance it would risk being an abuse of collective power. So what are the widely rec-
ognized obligations to people not living in our own societies? Necessarily, they will fall
far short of those we recognize towards our fellow citizens. Partly this is because within
a society, the prospect of reciprocity forms a solid foundation for generosity. In contrast,
obligations towards much poorer societies are not meaningfully reciprocal. I think that
these minimal obligations are reducible to two “duties of rescue,” one immediate and
one prospective.
Recognition of an immediate duty of rescue is the normal ethical response when it is
possible to alleviate a life-​threatening situation. If other people are dying avoidably of
hunger, disaster, or disease, most ordinary people recognize a duty of rescue from catas-
trophe. In response to the earthquake in Haiti of 2010, half of American households
made donations; in response to the Ethiopian famine of 1984, millions of British house-
holds did the same. It is both an appropriate expression of the popular will and organ-
izationally efficient that rich societies such as the USA and Britain should also respond
to such a duty not just individually but collectively. Just as when we are threatened we
respond collectively with defence, when our hearts are moved we respond collectively
with aid. This is the ethical foundation for humanitarian aid.
But most aid is not for such humanitarian purposes, but rather for “development
assistance.” The difference in rationale is simply expressed in the familiar proposition
 The Ethical Foundations of Aid    547

that “if you give a man a fish it feeds him for a day, whereas if you teach him how to fish
it feeds him for life.” Reduced to a proposition about fish, the underlying ethical ration-
ale for development assistance might seem to be merely a far-​sighted variant of that for
humanitarian aid. But, of course, this would not bear scrutiny. Building a more robust
ethical rationale for development assistance is the focus of this chapter. I begin with a
story of dramatic divergence between economies.
Until around 1850, income inequalities between countries were modest. But between
1850 and 1980, industrialization in the West and Japan finally reached the stage at which
living standards rose dramatically. Meanwhile, other countries stagnated, so that global
inequalities exploded. As the world diverged economically, it integrated socially: infor-
mation travelled more easily, and people in poor countries saw that elsewhere lives were
radically better. As disaffection grew, governments needed to offer their populations the
credible prospect of better lives. Some governments, notably China’s, succeeded. As the
global economy prospered, the scope for reaching modest levels of prosperity increased.
By 2015 virtually no society that had sustained reasonably functional government for a
few decades was still poor. But in many societies government was built on elite patronage
systems which frustrated the economic processes triggered in the prospering societies.
This juxtaposition of hopeful prosperity for the majority of countries (some already
at high levels of income, most others on track to become so) with hopeless poverty for
a minority of countries has created an ethical rationale for development assistance.
Although it has not usually been formulated in this way, I suggest that just as there is
an accepted duty of rescue from immediate catastrophe, so there is acceptance, albeit
inchoate, of a duty of rescue from mass despair.
The individual condition of despair is recognized as exceptionally destructive both
psychologically and practically. Psychologically it deprives us of peace of mind; practic-
ally, it incapacitates us of purposive actions to improve our circumstances. As individ-
uals, when we meet such despair we try to alleviate it. But in the current economic state
of the world, whereas most societies offer credible hope of prosperity to their average
citizen, some societies do not. Clearly, there can be no global collective duty to rescue
individuals from despair: this is a matter for individual and collective action within a
society. But the mass absence of credible hope of a better life is different. If the econ-
omy is impoverished and stagnant, no redistributive actions from rich to poor within
the society can remedy the situation: mass despair is rational. In a few of these societies,
such as North Korea, there is nothing that we can do about it: hermetically defended,
they are beyond our reach. But in many such societies there is some scope for collective
help to alleviate collective despair. Until this duty has been met to the best of our abil-
ity, it is hard to see why any other use of “development assistance” would be ethically
justified.
While the ethical foundations of aid reduce to these two duties, the historical evolution
of development assistance has not reflected them. In the next section I describe that evo-
lution. I then evaluate current development assistance against my proposed benchmark
of the duty of rescue from despair. But development assistance is rapidly evolving, driven
by the arrival of China as a major development actor which has adopted a very different
548   Paul Collier

approach, by new understanding of how economies escape stagnation, and by new donor
concerns such as climate change. These raise a new and complex ethical issue: under
what circumstances is it ethically acceptable for aid to generate benefits to the donor?

The Historic Rationales for Aid

The institutional impetus for development assistance has not been firmly grounded on
any clear ethical principles, let alone the duty of rescue from mass despair. Aid began
in the wake of the Second World War. The massive devastation led to a proposal to
establish an International Bank for Reconstruction. As an addendum, the proposal was
broadened to serve a larger international constituency by adding “and Development”
to its remit: in 1947 what we now know as the World Bank was born, and with it inter-
national aid. Reflecting its core agenda of reconstruction, the initial development activ-
ities of the Bank were confined to financing infrastructure, for which there was indeed
an acute need. From this ad hoc beginning, aid programmes expanded for further ad
hoc reasons. As Britain’s colonies became independent, the Colonial Office, the part of
government which had administered them, evolved to continue its relationship through
financial support. In France, the other major colonial power, financial assistance was
scaled up further. It proved to be a convenient way of channelling public money into the
French political parties by bypassing the normal mechanisms of budgetary scrutiny. In
the USA, the Cold War came to be fought on many fronts, one of them being financial
support for pro-​Western governments. Only with the end of the Cold War did aid agen-
cies begin to think ethically. This led to two radically different approaches.
One was a response to the mounting evidence that the persistence of mass poverty in
a society was the fault of its government. Where the policies chosen by elite-​serving gov-
ernments were the problem, the appropriate donor response appeared to be to make aid
conditional upon the adoption of better policies. During the 1980s, when the oil shock
created major fiscal and payments crises across Africa, this had the added advantage
that large packages of aid could be delivered quickly in return for government prom-
ises of policy reform, whereas previously flows had reflected actual spending on invest-
ment projects. Aid thereby became conditioned upon a widening range of economic
policies: exchange rates, deregulation, reductions in public employment, and privatiza-
tion. This approach generated powerful political backlashes from Western electorates.
The right concluded that if rotten regimes were the problem, giving them aid was waste-
ful, and made things worse by empowering them. The left, already engaged in oppos-
ition to the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher, linked the policies required by
conditionality to their domestic concerns through coining the concept “the neo-​liberal
agenda.” They concluded that, far from poverty being due to poor governance, it was due
to donor insistence on this agenda.
These political responses left donor agencies without political support: albeit for dif-
ferent reasons, by the 1990s the right and the left both wanted to close the World Bank.
 The Ethical Foundations of Aid    549

It thus became politically imperative to build an ethical case for aid, and the solution
was to focus it on lifting people out of poverty. This new approach was exemplified by a
new annual World Bank count of people living below one dollar per day; the new mis-
sion statement that President Wolfensohn of the World Bank introduced in 1997, “Our
dream is a world free from poverty”; and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
established by the United Nations in 2000. Essentially, all were pitched to Western tax-
payers. The aid agenda became social, especially health and education, its essence being
captured by images that linked aid to “putting a smile on a child’s face.”
If the purpose of aid was to reduce poverty, but successful development depended
upon the policies that governments adopted, it appeared that aid would be most effect-
ive in those countries with severe poverty and reasonable policies. Aid should be reallo-
cated to such countries from middle-​income countries with little poverty and from
low-​income countries that had terrible policies. This was formulated and quantified
in an influential article: “Aid Allocation and Poverty Reduction” (Collier and Dollar
2002). The article purported to answer the question “Where can aid achieve most pov-
erty reduction per dollar?” Although initially controversial, it became the basis for algo-
rithms that allocated aid both in the World Bank and for major bilateral donors.
Opposition to aid from the political right intensified, leaving the agencies no alter-
native to mending fences with the left. For example, in 1998 Mark Malloch-​Brown,
head of public relations at the World Bank and soon to be the architect of the MDGs,
had announced to his staff that they had been defeated by the PR of Oxfam criticism
of conditionality. In response, the content of conditionality evolved into one congenial
to the NGOs. By 2015, Western aid was routinely conditioned on strict environmen-
tal and human rights requirements. For example, all World Bank projects had to have
“environmental impact assessments.” Hydroelectric projects became impossible to
finance because NGOs considered that they infringed the human rights of people who
lived where dams would be located. Carbon emission standards were imposed on World
Bank projects in poor countries that were considerably higher than those practised in
high-​income countries. The sexual behaviour of Ugandans became a particular target of
NGO attention. First, American evangelicals persuaded USAID to require the national
campaign against AIDs to divert into promoting abstinence (Epstein 2007), and then
gay rights campaigners persuaded donors that the decision of the nation’s parliament to
restrict the rights of gay people must be countered by threats of a suspension of aid (see
Chapters 24 and 28).

Critique: The Divergence from the

Duty of Rescue from Mass Despair

In summary, by 2015 Western aid ostensibly for development assistance was focused
primarily on financing priorities set by the donor countries’ electorates, especially
550   Paul Collier

photogenic social expenditures, while being used as a means of imposing modern

Western values on poor, traditional societies. Inadvertently, development assistance has
thus diverged from its predominant ethical rationale: the duty of rescue from mass des-
pair. In consequence, it is ethically flawed.
First, the obsession with an annual global poverty count commits both type 1 and
type 2 errors of misclassification. It treats a poor family as the same, whether it is in
China, in Chad, or in Brazil. Being poor today is not a sure symptom of despair, which
is about prospects for the future. Even if the three families are equally poor, their pros-
pects are radically different. Chinese families have a solid basis for credible hope of
improvement: the Chinese government has mastered the task of getting the economy to
grow and spread opportunities. The government of Chad has not. Even if the Brazilian
family has poor prospects, it does not create an international duty of rescue. Brazil is
rich enough that if the society chose to do so, its poor could be lifted out of poverty
by internal transfers. Providing Brazil’s poor with international aid would create severe
moral hazard: why should affluent Brazilians accept the inconvenience of paying for the
Brazilian poor if foreigners are willing to do so instead? Conversely, in some societies
many people who are above the $1 a day threshold may reasonably despair of their soci-
eties as their condition deteriorates relative to the lifestyles they see are normal else-
where. Hopes are about relative, as well as absolute, conditions of living.
Secondly, the shift of aid towards health and education blurred the distinction
between humanitarian aid and development assistance. There is a clear humanitarian
case for health spending: lives can be saved by aid because good curative care is beyond
the means of governments in low-​income countries. A striking example has been the
donor response to the development of anti-​retroviral treatments for Africans who were
HIV+. As the cost dropped to a few hundred dollars per year, donors recognized a duty
of rescue from catastrophe towards those identifiable individuals who would other-
wise face certain death. A controversy erupted between health economists and NGOs,
with the former relying upon the probabilistic calculus of utilitarianism to argue that
other uses of public money could save more lives, and the latter recognizing that with
identifiable people facing avoidable deaths, there was a manifest duty of rescue from
catastrophe.
The shift to funding primary education was more questionable. Unlike curative health
care, primary education is inexpensive. Financing it through donors trespasses on
what should be a core function of government. If a government is not undertaking this
responsibility towards the nation’s children, it is hard to see how it can establish legit-
imacy with its citizens. This is an example of a critique of aid that accuses it of weaken-
ing the interest of government in strengthening the economy, and the accountability of
government to citizens. The argument, based upon the historical evolution of European
states, is that both depend upon the need of government to get revenue through taxing
citizens. Only once the government taxes the economy does it have an incentive to pro-
mote economic growth, and only once it taxes citizens does it provoke scrutiny. Donors
could reduce this tension between their provision of finance for government and the
reduced need of governments to raise taxation by financing major infrastructure
 The Ethical Foundations of Aid    551

projects which would otherwise be infeasible—​precisely the type of development assist-

ance that has been scaled back.
Thirdly, the hijacking of conditionality for the promotion of current Western values is
troubling. Even if these values are seen as absolute, global, and permanent, making them
a condition for the escape from despair breaches the Western value of freedom. Further,
even if conditions change behaviour, there is reason to doubt their efficacy in changing
opinions. The attempt to restrict the freedom of action of the recipient produces a psy-
chological response termed “reactance” in which the actor wishes to breach the restric-
tion to re-​establish autonomy. Even where the actor complies with the condition, it is
explained as a temporary concession to force majeure. Far from promoting a change of
attitudes, it impedes social learning.
Finally, alongside Western attempts to force our values on poor societies, within
Western societies there has been an espousal of multiculturalism—​the coexistence of
alternative value systems. Not only are the two positions incompatible, neither position
is ethically defensible. The cultures prevalent in many poor societies are in import-
ant respects flawed. Cultures of inter-​group violence, of corruption, of honour, and of
female subjection trap societies into poverty and need to be changed. While cultural
change cannot be imposed from outside, it can be assisted by exposing key nodes of
activity, such as tax collection, education, and the courts, to their counterparts in more
functional societies. It is not ethically controversial to propose that tax collectors should
raise money for their country, not their family; that teachers should turn up for lessons
and learn their subject; and that judges should apply the law rather than sell judgements
for money and sex.
The capacity to tax is now seen by economists as critical to the emergence of an effect-
ive state. Consider the administration of Value Added Tax (VAT), a major means of
revenue-​raising encouraged by the IMF. Yet in several poor societies VAT is actually
reducing revenue. Many tax inspectors are corrupt, using their power to tax firms as a
means of extorting money for themselves: “pay me or pay tax.” VAT has reduced revenue
because it expanded the options available to corrupt tax officials, enabling them to sell
firms phoney tax receipts on inputs, in addition to the standard extortion racket. As a
result, the rebate system ends up paying out more than the sales tax component of VAT
is generating. Clearly, at the core of this phenomenon are norms of behaviour among tax
officials, such that seizing opportunities for private gain is seen as both more prestigious
and satisfying than contributing to the public good of generating tax revenue and the
public services it can finance: a “good tax inspector” is one who uses his position to help
his family, not his country.
How might donor agencies in countries with functioning VAT systems help to change
this perception? Social prestige and personal satisfaction are largely set within peer
groups: most people want to be respected by their peers, and find satisfaction in adher-
ing to group norms. Hence, a way of changing the behaviour of corrupt officials is to alter
the group of people they regard as their peers. Currently, an official is likely to have two
networks in which they seek prestige: their extended family and fellow tax inspectors.
Their family will honour them for helping relatives: becoming the patron of the family.
552   Paul Collier

Their fellow tax inspectors, subject to the same family pressures, may see corruption as
reasonable. They may even regard honest behaviour as a threat and therefore disloyal. A
way of changing this state of affairs is to twin tax administrations in which corruption
is endemic with those where it is not. Twinning might involve regular secondments of
staff in both directions, and accreditation to international professional associations. The
purpose would be to transfer, not technical skills, but attitudes and behaviours. The new
network exposes the official to the potential of a new identity as a member of a presti-
gious international peer group, working to global, not local standards. It exposes the
official to a new narrative circulating in the network: that tax officials are vital for the
provision of core public services. And it exposes the official to a new norm of “good”
conduct. A “good” tax inspector is no longer one who raises a lot of money for their
family, but one who rigorously implements the tax code to make the rest of government
feasible.
In summary, it is ethically legitimate and practically necessary for development assist-
ance to try to change some value systems, but it is not best achieved by conditionality,
and is best confined to those organizations such as tax administration that are critical to
the escape from mass poverty.

Reinforcing the Duty of Rescue:

Aid for Mutual Benefit

Some uses of aid both address the duty of rescue and serve the interest of the donor.
This is aid for mutual benefit. As long as the efficacy of the aid in reducing despair is
unaffected, the addition of a benefit to the donor is an unambiguous gain. Trivially, for a
given benefit to the recipient the addition of a benefit to the donor is a Pareto-​improving
enhancement of global welfare. However, more remarkably, even from the perspec-
tive of the recipient, the addition of a gain to the donor is welcome. By making benefits
mutual, it makes the relationship less unequal: the genuine partnership of a deal, rather
than the faux “partnership” of charity. Further, by providing the donor with a benefit,
it anchors the project in self-​interest, making donor commitment more credible. Most
important, the direct benefit, over and above the moral satisfaction of fulfilling a duty of
rescue, will induce the rational donor to provide more aid to the recipient than if the sole
benefit was moral satisfaction. Hence, aid budgets will end up being larger. This is both
directly derivable from a rational choice perspective on decisions and readily discern-
ible in the practical politics of aid, with donor agencies keen to stress direct benefits to
their own society.
There is nothing inherently bad about designing aid in such a way that it generates
mutual benefit. On the contrary, it can be desirable. However, it does carry the potential
for an adverse effect: the diversion of aid from projects which make a large contribution
to the duty of rescue to those which make a smaller contribution but which also generate
benefits for the donor. Even when this happens, the overall effect of mutual benefit may
 The Ethical Foundations of Aid    553

still be superior to the purely charitable model of aid. While each dollar of mutual bene-
fit aid is less effective for the duty of rescue, the donor still has an incentive to provide
more aid. The net effect of diversion expansionary is ambiguous.
Western NGOs have been strongly opposed to any use of aid that has an element
of self-​interest. However, their opposition is not based on a judgement that the diver-
sionary effect would predominate: rather, it is existential. Charitable purpose being an
existential characteristic of NGOs themselves, any deviation in government agencies
is regarded as “impure.” At the urging of NGOs, in 2002 the British Parliament legally
required DFID, exclusively to pursue the reduction in global poverty, as opposed to
commercial self-​interest (Department for International Development 2002).
As Michael Sandel has argued, there are indeed areas of human behaviour where the
introduction of self-​interest is inappropriate (Sandel 2012). However, it is difficult to see
why the objective of lifting societies out of mass despair of ever attaining prosperity should
be in this category. The only economic system which has succeeded in lifting people out
of mass poverty is modern market capitalism, and this clearly combines self-​interest with
motivations that are ethically more attractive. If insistence upon eschewing self-​interest
in meeting this vital objective impaired its achievement, the moral “purity” of the donor
would be purchased at a heavy price in terms of the prolonged suffering of those in despair.
However, while aid for mutual benefit is ethically permissible, due to the diversion
effect it has the potential to be less effective for the duty of rescue than purely charitable
aid. In consequence, any project characterized by mutual benefit must be scrutinized
to ascertain whether it is indeed as effective as the best alternative use of the money in a
project that addressed only the duty of rescue.
I now subject four uses of aid which are claimed to generate mutual benefits to such
scrutiny. These are the recent Chinese infrastructure-​for-​resources deals in Africa; the
use of aid to subsidize commercial investment in poor countries as practised by the
International Finance Corporation of the World Bank; the deployment of aid to states
which are considered to be a threat to international security, such as Afghanistan; and
the use of aid for the mitigation of climate change.

Chinese Infrastructure-​for-​Resource Deals

as Mutual Benefit
Post-​2000, while Western donors were shifting aid to the social agenda promoted by the
Millennium Development Goals, China arrived on the scene with an utterly different
approach to aid: “mutual benefit.” Recipient governments determined its use according
to their own priorities: “we will not ask any questions” was the mantra of the President
of China as he toured Africa. But in return, China would require the aid to be part of a
package of deals that provided benefits to China. The archetypal such deal was that an
African government would get some infrastructure that it wanted, to be constructed
by a Chinese company and financed by a soft loan from a Chinese bank, in return for a
natural-​resource concession awarded to a Chinese company.
554   Paul Collier

African governments favoured this approach: it removed conditionality, enabled

them to set their own priorities for infrastructure rather than social spending, and was
faster. Mutual benefit was more dignified, avoiding the inherent asymmetry of power
of the donor–​recipient relationship. It also gave the Chinese a clear interest in imple-
menting what was agreed. This contrasted with the perceived fickleness of Western don-
ors, where priorities often changed to placate electorates, or according to the fashions
of donor enthusiasms. African governments had grown particularly concerned about
the long-​term implications of donor enthusiasm for social spending because of its
“time-​inconsistency.” Once governments had increased their donor-​funded spending,
for example by enrolling more children into schools, donors had an incentive to switch
their priorities to something else, knowing that the high political costs of scaling back
enrolments meant that the initial government decisions were irreversible.
There was, however, much wrong with the Chinese approach: mutual benefit meant
that the Chinese would look after their own interest and expected African governments
to do the same. The asymmetry of power shifted, from donor–​recipient to capable–​less
capable. The packages were usually opaque, and were negotiated at the highest level
of recipient governments rather than won in open competition. In combination, the
lack of transparency and the lack of competition created suspicions that terms were
so skewed in favour of the Chinese that “aid” might be notional. The IMF opposed the
packages because they bypassed the budget: natural resources were exchanged directly
for infrastructure rather than being decomposed into two distinct transactions, a sale of
resources and a purchase of infrastructure. However, there was some rationale for pack-
aging the two together: it provided a mechanism by which a government could commit
to offset the depletion of a natural asset with the acquisition of another asset. Often,
when the sale of resources generates revenues that flow into the national budget, day-​to-​
day political pressures assign them to popular but unsustainable recurrent expenditures
such as wage increases. Arguably, the main weakness of the Chinese packages has been
that they were not subject to competition. This reflected the reluctance of Western don-
ors to package aid with commercial transactions.

Subsidies for Commercial Investment as Mutual Benefit

Several donor agencies have affiliates which do partner with commercial ventures, most
notably the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group. However, it
is expected to operate without any subsidy beyond that constituted by its initial donor-​
provided capital. Indeed, it is expected to operate at a profit which is used to augment
the aid budget administered by another part of the Bank. Yet aid as a subsidy for com-
mercial investment, which is inherent in the Chinese model of the package deal, had an
important advantage over aid as charity.
The poorest countries are acutely short of investment by modern firms. Such firms
make ordinary workers radically more productive than in the traditional economy by
harnessing scale and specialization. In turn, generating such increases in productivity is
 The Ethical Foundations of Aid    555

essential for the mass escape from despair. Yet for entirely rational reasons, not enough
of these firms want to operate in poor societies. Government policies are often defi-
cient: good firms are now justifiably terrified of the reputational risk to which they are
exposed if they operate in cultures of corruption. But even when policies are reasonable,
in regions burdened with a bad reputation they elicit a hesitant private sector response.
Reputable firms which make investment in these environments are pioneers. If they
succeed, they are liable to be imitated by subsequent entrants, generating benefits to the
country but not to the firm. In the language of economics, reputable firms which invest
in poor countries generate positive externalities. Aid as a subsidy to pioneer firms is an
ethically reasonably and practically useful mechanism which compensates them for
these benefits that accrue to others. Crucially, the escape from mass poverty is largely
driven by the modern private sector; so confining aid to public-​sector uses severely
restricts its potential. Indeed, a central function of aid will be to induce more firms to go
to places that they would otherwise have avoided. To an extent this can be by financing
the necessary public infrastructure such as power and transport, but the highest-​impact
aid will probably be that which co-​finances private investments by covering some risks.
Donor agencies that used aid for this purpose would not be “contaminated.” The notion
that mass poverty can be overcome directly by sufficient donor financing of govern-
ments is a comfortable but unfortunate delusion fostered by NGOs and the Millennium
Development Goals.
However, using aid to subsidize private investment introduces the risk that diversion
towards self-​interest will reduce the overall efficacy of aid. Addressing this risk depends
upon the public agencies that dispense subsidies assigning sufficient weight in their
decisions to the duty of rescue. Like all aspects of organizational cultures, this depends
upon the leadership being ethically aligned with the public purpose. If attracting reput-
able firms to countries that they do not wish to go to is essential to meet the duty of res-
cue, agencies must make aid-​as-​subsidy work.

Aid to Fragile States as Mutual Benefit

Some countries are at serious risk of falling into mass violence; others are in the midst
of it. The term that now describes such societies is “fragile.” There are three official lists
of fragile countries, with around forty countries on them. Fragile countries are unlikely
to offer credible hope of prosperity for their people: social order is a prerequisite for
economic development. Thus, fragile countries are a subset of the countries for which
there is a duty of rescue. This is now being recognized among aid agencies. For example,
DFID, which has already largely confined its aid to those countries that meet the two
criteria of the duty of rescue, now assigns half of its budget to states that are also fragile.
However, from an ethical perspective, the interesting aspect of aid to fragile states is that
it generates mutual benefit. When societies descend into violent disorder they adversely
affect other societies, especially, but not exclusively, neighbours. Current examples such
as Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Yemen, and Syria are so prominent
556   Paul Collier

that the point requires little elaboration. In the language of social science, those societies
that are fragile constitute a global public bad, so that aid deployed to reduce that fragil-
ity has the potential to be a global public good. Whether aid can reduce fragility is open
to debate. Fragility usually has complex and intractable causes well beyond the lack of
money. For example, violent disorder may be indicative of a dysfunctional culture of vio-
lence. Aid agencies urgently need to switch from their comfortable past agendas of sup-
porting social spending in societies where the state works reasonably well and there is an
established domestic business community, such as India, to building the foundations for
growth in societies such as South Sudan, where neither is the case. Learning how to use
aid in such difficult contexts is the essential future challenge for the agencies.
It might appear that aid to reduce fragility would be mutually benefit at its best. The
recipients facing disorder are at the extremity need, and the interest of the donors in the
security of their own and neighbouring societies is entirely legitimate. Yet aid to reduce
fragility has become ethically controversial. Evidently, if the society is facing actual or
potential disorder, part of the appropriate response is likely to be the strengthening
of military security. But since security expenditure has the potential to be repressive,
it is actively discouraged by both donor agencies and NGOs: military spending is the
antithesis of the social agenda. The example of Mali and Chad in Sahelian Africa illus-
trates the ethical dilemma. Mali, a well-​functioning democracy, became something of
a donor darling, but in consequence the military budget was kept modest. In contrast,
because Chad discovered oil, in a high-​profile confrontation its government broke free
of pressure from donors and NGOs, and restricted military spending. In the wake of
the collapse of Libya, and the dispersion of Gaddafi’s stockpile of sophisticated arma-
ments around the Sahel, the Malian army was defeated by Islamic insurgents. The coun-
try has collapsed into disorder. Meanwhile Chad, with the strongest army in the Sahel
region, is being celebrated as the backbone of the counterattack on Boko Haram, the
Islamic insurgency group in Northern Nigeria that has specialized in kidnap, rape, and
slavery. In central Africa it has recently been judged necessary by the United Nations
for foreign troops to be stationed in Mali, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and the
Central African Republic. Should the expenditures on these forces be regarded as aid?
Since security is a precondition for development, there seems little basis for excluding
them. But if so, should support that strengthens the national military capacity, thereby
enabling foreign troops to be withdrawn, not also count as aid? Other than a tempera-
mental distaste for the military among NGOs and the development community, it is dif-
ficult to find a justification for these exclusions.

Aid for the Mitigation of Climate Change

as Mutual Benefit
Increasingly, aid is being used to promote the mitigation of carbon emissions. Since the
main beneficiaries of a reduction in global warming will be poorer countries, it might
 The Ethical Foundations of Aid    557

appear that such aid is an anodyne instance of mutual benefit. I will suggest that, on the
contrary, it is an instance of the insidious process by which the objective of the donor is
taken to be coincident with the objective of the recipient.
The responsibility of the OECD and middle-​income countries to curb their car-
bon emissions is manifest: the long-​term consequences of continued high levels of
emissions for many poor countries are severe. However, a simple brute technological
fact limits the beneficiaries: due to the long lag between emissions and their conse-
quences, the beneficiaries of expenditures on mitigation will overwhelmingly be
people living in the distant future. In contrast, the duty to rescue from mass hope-
lessness is an agenda that must be addressed over the shorter time-​scale of the cur-
rent generation. Though daunting, the task is manageable if aid and other policies are
highly focused on it, since the societies needing help are already a small minority of
mankind. Climate change needs to be addressed, but it should be financed out of new
instruments such as carbon taxes, not by a diversion of aid budgets from the duty of
rescue from mass despair. This applies whether or not the expenditures take place in
low-​income countries. There are indeed opportunities for OECD countries to meet
their obligations for emissions reduction by undertaking projects in poor countries
that reduce emissions more cost-​effectively than in the home country. This is a sens-
ible thing for OECD countries to do in their own interest, but it has nothing to do with
aid. Some projects can indeed meet the dual criteria of the duty of rescue from despair
and climate mitigation. For example, the replacement of high-​cost diesel electricity
generators by gas-​powered generators satisfies the duty of rescue by providing more
and cheaper electricity, while also reducing emissions. But as with all claims of mutual
benefit, such projects must be scrutinized. The most pertinent climate-​related legit-
imate uses of aid are likely to be for adaptation rather than mitigation: poor countries
will need to adapt to the climate change that will occur during the next two decades as
a result of past emissions.

Conclusion

To date, aid has nestled under the generic ethical banner of charity. Its presumed photo-
genic recipients, needy children, have appeared to be all the moral justification that was
necessary. But the actual practice of aid has at times drifted quite far from a secure eth-
ical anchor. In this chapter I have tried to provide such an anchor in terms of the duty of
successful societies to rescue a minority of other societies from the immediate tragedy
of humanitarian catastrophes, and from the prospective tragedy of societies that do not
provide credible hope of prosperity for the mass of their population. These ethical foun-
dations can usefully be reinforced by “mutual benefit”: the addition of an element of
self-​interest. But due to the potential for moral hazard, claims of mutual benefit must be
rigorously assessed.
558   Paul Collier

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Richard Manning, whose perceptive suggestions and criticisms have
strongly influenced this chapter.

References
Collier, P., and D. Dollar (2002). Aid Allocation and Poverty Reduction. European Economic
Review 46(8): 1475–​1500.
Department for International Development (2002). The International Development Act
(London: Home Office).
Epstein, H. (2007). The Invisible Cure (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Sandel, M. (2012). What Money Can’t Buy (London: Penguin).
 ­c hapter 42

A Fem inist Prac t i c a l

Ethics of C a re

Fiona Robinson

This chapter offers an account of a distinctively “practical” feminist international eth-

ics, and considers its relevance to the building of policy, practices, and institutions of
humanitarianism. Of course, it could be argued that all feminist approaches to ethics
are, in some important senses, practical. Feminist theory—​in the humanities and social
sciences—​is inextricably connected to feminism as a social and political movement
dedicated to the transformation of oppressive or exclusive gender relations. Due, in
part, to this connection, feminist moral philosophers have long questioned the dom-
inant view of ethics as a codifiable and usually compact set of moral formulas or prin-
ciples that can be applied by any agent to a situation to yield a justified and determinate
action-​guiding judgement (Walker 1998: 52). Feminists have countered this claim with
the argument that moral practices cannot be extricated from other social practices,
nor moral identitites from social roles and institutions in particular lifeways (Walker
1998: 17). As Kimberly Hutchings has put it, “Feminist ethics is not reducible to the
articulation of feminist ideals but requires constant interrogation of the conditions of
possibility of putting those ideals into practice in a world that is gendered all the way
down” (Hutchings 2007a: 103).
Of course, just as there is division and contest within the feminist movement, there
is no single feminist ethics.1 This chapter will focus on one widely used and debated
approach to feminist ethics known as “ethics of care.” I do not suggest that this is the
only or “best” approach to feminist ethics, or that it should somehow trump all of the
others. However, there are at least three reasons why the ethics of care provides the best
starting point for developing a practical feminist international ethics. First, it is widely
recognized that the ethics of care articulates an approach to morality that is borne out
by the experiences of women, and that has been silenced by the dominance of mascu-
linist moral theories. Indeed, care ethics has played an important role in the develop-
ment of feminist thought and feminist theory over the last several decades. Second,
central to the ethics of care is the idea that ethics is located in practices of care, rather
560   Fiona Robinson

than in deontic or utilitarian principles. Finally, despite its origins in empirical social-​
psychological research on individual moral responses, care ethics is now increasingly
invoked—​in both conceptual and policy terms—​at the level of the international or “glo-
bal.” For a number of reasons—​both theoretical and empirical—​the “global” has become
an increasingly salient scale at which to discuss care (Raghuram 2012: 159).
This chapter will build a picture of a critical, feminist ethics of care as a feminist prac-
tical ethics for international relations. In particular, it will focus on the ethics of care as a
moral framework for addressing the challenges of humanitarianism—​in a manner that
foregrounds human needs while not depoliticizing or taking for granted the category of
“human.” In particular, a care ethics approach to humanitarianism is one that furthers
the transformative aims of feminism, while refusing to cast “women-​and-​children” as
vulnerable victims in need of protection. Attention to gender in the context of humani-
tarianism has tended to focus on the ways in which gender relations and inequalities
influence both vulnerabilities and capacities, as well as people’s ability to respond in
emergency situations, such as natural disasters or conflict situations (CIDA 2003: 5).
But even where women’s capacity or agency is recognized, the tendency is to focus
on the differences among men and women and how this affects their experiences of
humanitarian crisis. An ethics of care, by contrast, starts with a picture of care in a given
context—​its history, present, and the possibilities for change. In the making of policies
and programmes, it seeks to reason with the demands—​often conflicting demands—​
of care in mind, and to recognize the centrality of these demands and needs for those
experiencing a period of crisis.
The first section of this chapter will set out the central ideas of an ethics of care, con-
trasting it to dominant approaches in IPT. In this section I will emphasize the signifi-
cance of care as a global ethics, while emphasizing the need to pay attention to context,
history, and the mutual constitution of the local and the global. The second section will
discuss the ethics of care as a “practical” feminist IPT, focusing on its relevance for the
practices and policies of humanitarianism in the contemporary world.

International Political Theory and

the Ethics of Care

The now-​extensive body of literature known as the “ethics of care” first emerged as a
result of a sense of disquiet—​a feeling on the part of a handful of women scholars that
something was not right, or at least not complete, in our dominant accounts of the
nature of morality and moral development. When, in 1980, Sara Ruddick first wrote
about mothers as thinkers, she did so based on a strong belief that their ways of thinking
and acting were different fro the dominant ideas of the rational moral agent to which
we were accustomed (Ruddick 1980). Likewise, when Carol Gilligan and her colleagues
began their empirical research on the moral-​psychological development of girls and
 A Feminist Practical Ethics of Care    561

women, boys and men, she did so with a similar belief that the views of her teacher,
Lawrence Kohlberg, were “blind to the particularities of voice and the inevitable con-
structions that constitute point of view.” It was, she argues, based on an “inerrant neu-
trality which concealed power and falsified knowledge” (Gilligan 1993: xviii).
In her research, Gilligan presented a series of moral dilemmas to women and men,
boys and girls. What she heard from the girls and women was a “different voice” of
morality, one that saw the world as “comprised of relationships rather than of people
standing alone, a world that coheres through human connection rather than through a
system of rules” (Gilligan 1993: 29). Gilligan describes what she heard when listening to
one woman talk about morality, relationships, and selfhood:

In seeing individual lives as connected and embedded in a social context of relation-

ship, she expands her moral perspective to encompass a notion of “collective life”.
Responsibility now includes both self and other, viewed as different but connected
rather than as separate and opposed. This cognizance of interdependence, rather
than a concern with reciprocity, informs her belief that ‘we all do to some extent have
responsibilities to look out for each other. (Gilligan 1993: 147)

This kind of understanding of the nature of morality has particular relevance to the idea
of a feminist practical ethics. Because the voice of care is not searching for objective prin-
ciples of right or the good, but seeks to navigate moral dilemmas in context by attending
to relations of care—​by making sure no one is left alone or hurt—​it challenges the div-
ide between “theory” and “practice.” It emphasizes the importance of context in moral
judgement and action, and starts with a view of moral agents as inherently vulnerable
and interdependent. On this view, there is no time when we are not thinking and acting
morally, since morality is woven into the very fabric of our relations with others. That
this voice of morality was heard in the responses of women and girls—​and not in those
of men and boys—​does not indicate essential or physiological differences in the moral
psychology of men and women. Rather, it indicates the effects of gender socialization,
and of gendered understandings of the roles, responsibilities, and subjectivities of men
and women. The ethics of care is thus a “feminist” ethics, because it reveals both the pro-
cesses and structures that have characterized women as caring and thus contributed to
the circumscribing of societal roles and norms for men and women, and the processes
by which the values and practices of care have been feminized—​and thus consistently
undervalued—​in a large number of historical and spatial contexts around the world.
In this sense, the ethics of care offers a “deep challenge” to other moral theories (Held
2006: 26). It conforms to what Margaret Walker has called the “expressive-​collaborative”
model, which prescribes an investigation of morality as a socially embodied medium
of mutual understanding and negotiation between people over their responsibility for
things open to human care and response (Walker 1998: 9). As such, it contrasts vividly
to what the “theoretical-​juridical” model of morality and moral theories, which has
prevailed as the template for “serious” or “important” moral theorizing in ethics in the
twentieth century (p. 7). This model has been prevalent not only in analytical moral
562   Fiona Robinson

philosophy and political theory but also in the field of interational ethics or, as it is now
commonly called, International Political Theory (IPT). In particular, this field is domin-
ated by theories of global justice, in the liberal-​cosmopolitan tradition. These accounts
stress the necessity of establishing universalizable principles in order to achieve a just
world order. Moreover, they argue that these global principles of justice apply to indi-
viduals, who are seen as the autonomous constituents of a cosmopolitan world order
(Caney 2010: 152).
At first glance, the ethics of care appears to have little to say in response to domin-
ant accounts of international ethics. Gilligan’s early articulation of the different voice
of care centred on the moral responses of individuals to others with whom they exist
in relationship in ways that would sustain rather than sever connection. These “oth-
ers” were close connections—​immediate family members, close friends, loved ones—​
and the types of moral dilemmas posed by Gilligan and her colleagues were what might
be described as “small-​scale” or “personal” in nature. But when political theorists and
philosophers recognized the political implications of Gilligan’s work, they demon-
strated the significance of an ethic of care beyond the narrow realm of interpersonal
or “private” relations. More correctly, feminist moral and political theorists demon-
strated the false divide between “private” and “public” in thinking about morality. Care
was thus shown to be a mode of reasoning that did not discriminate among separate
“spheres” or scales—​“care-​full” reasoning could be and was being applied to all aspects
of life, including those that involved weighing up responsibilities and considering rela-
tionships beyond the “intimate” level.
Indeed, political theorists of care have argued that care ethics reaches its full potential
when understood politically (see especially Tronto 1993). The idea of a political ethics
of care recognizes that relations of care operate within and through relations of power.
While most of the work on care in political theory focuses on its role in shaping political
life within the borders of the nation-​state as political community—​addressing concepts
such as democracy and citizenship—​recent research has pushed further the challenging
of boundaries to consider care ethics at the level of international or global politics. Fiona
Robinson’s 1999 book, Globalizing Care, explored how care ethics can provide a compel-
ling alternative to rationalist, rights-​based or “justice” reasoning in international ethics.
Since then, work on global care ethics has revealed the transnational and global implica-
tions of both existing relations of care—​and the racialized, gendered relations of power
in which they are embedded—​and the potential for new and transformative caring rela-
tions and responsibilities across borders. For example, Fierke (2014) explores the para-
dox in a global ethic of care of the importance of the particular other and the need to
extend care to ever-​larger spaces. She uses the idea of “multidirectional traumatic mem-
ories” (of the Holocaust/​al Nakba) as a basis for rethinking antagonistic relationships
and creating relations of attentiveness that acknowledge the autonomy and humanity of
the other.
In seeking to remain cognizant of difference while theorizing “globalized” care, fem-
inist ethicists must remember the importance of context as a defining feature of the eth-
ics of care. When asked by Gilligan about how to balance competing responsibilities,
 A Feminist Practical Ethics of Care    563

11-​year-​old Amy replied, “Well, it really depends on the situation” (Gilligan 1993: 35).
While this may be read as a failure to reason decisively, or to have reached moral matur-
ity (especially when contrasted with 11-​year-​old Jake’s confident response assigning
fractions of responsibility), it can also be read as demonstrating an understanding of
the complexity and fundamental irresolvability of most moral dilemmas. This humility
about the possibility of moral judgement, combined with the desire to do one’s best to
consider the needs of all of those in one’s care, must be at the heart of moral responsive-
ness based on an ethic of care.
In the section that follows, I will explore the possibilities and potentials of global care
ethics as a feminist practical ethics for humanitarianism. As the discussion below illus-
trates, this approach eschews the common formulation of “practical” as “application” of
principles. Rather, it is a view of ourselves as subjects constituted in and through care
that must guide our thinking in the context of humanitarianism.

Care and Humanitarianism

Humanitarianism—​as a moral attitude, and a set of policies, practices, and institutions—​

has been subject to much reflection and criticism, especially in the last two decades.
Since the end of the Cold War, humanitarianism has transformed from a set of “rela-
tively independent, poorly resourced and fairly marginal” groups acting in response to
human crises, to today’s “hugely well-​resourced state humanitarianism.” Quoting David
Reiff, Jenny Edkins explains how, after 1989, humanitarianism was the only feasible dir-
ection for “the ethically serious European” (Reiff 2002: 111, quoted in Edkins 2003: 254)
following the discrediting of both communism and developmentalism. In terms of
its guiding ethic, humanitarianism has struggled with the demands of neutrality and
impartiality—​to treat the human qua human, remaining blind to history and context.
Paradoxically, this moral objective transformed, over time, into a defence of individ-
ual human rights through various forms of “intervention,” ultimately undermining the
neutral defence of the individual human being it sought to achieve (Edkins 2003: 249).
A critical feminist ethics of care provides the basis for an alternative to the dominant
impartialist, cosmopolitan approaches to the moral challenges of humanitarianism. The
ethics of care rejects both the universalizing assumptions of moral cosmopolitanism—​
based as they are on an impartialist view of “common humanity”—​and the communi-
tarian assumptions of shared moral feeling based on citizenship. Beyond this abstract
and tidy dichotomy is the messy reality of responding to the multiple, diverse, and often
conflicting needs of particular others, and judging with care—​in ways that seek to bal-
ance attention to competing needs, and find the least harmful ways of responding to
impossible moral decisions. Thus, a care ethics lens reminds those charged with making
decisions in humanitarian contexts that there can be no “one-​size-​fits-​all” set of moral
principles that can be applied in the formulating of policy or the creation of institutions.
Indeed, there is no “short cut” to careful consideration of the people involved—​the
564   Fiona Robinson

nature of their relationships within and across families and communities—​and the vari-
ous needs that require attention. But in addition, care ethics provides policy-​makers
with a substantive focus—​careful consideration of needs for care-​giving and receiving
within the context of particular humanitarian situations. This means paying attention
to the history, current practices, and rupturing of caring relations, and the relations
of gender—​and often race and class—​that sustain them. Thus, humanitarianism is no
longer about charitable or benevolent “helping” of “humans”—​defined as vulnerable
victims in need; rather, it is about careful attention to locational specificities of care—​
both historically and in current contexts—​and seeking to assist with the restoration or
enhancement of care relations in ways that are are non-​exploitative and adequate for
meeting the needs of both care-​givers and care-​receivers.
Like the Foucauldian response to humanitarianism, a critical feminist ethics of care
rejects the narrative of human beings as “separate, atomized individuals” who share a
“common essence” (Edkins 2003: 256). Instead, both perspectives see subjects as “pro-
duced always already in and through relations with other subjects” (p. 256). And while
Foucauldians emphasize the “solidarity of the governed,” care ethics emphasizes the
quotidian practices of care that are a feature of most lives. As Tronto argues, if we take
our activities of care as examples of moral action, then all of us engage in moral actions
much of the time (Tronto 1993: 164). On this view, individuals are presumed to be in a
state of moral engagement, rather than a condition of detachment (p. 164). Thus, it no
longer becomes surprising that people feel compelled to respond to those in distress;
what becomes suprising and in need of explanation instead is why sometimes people
see others’ suffering as none of their business (p. 256). Care ethics, however, relies less
on the Foucauldian “solidarity of the shaken” (p. 256) and more on the varied practices
of sustaining life that characterize not only the “exceptional” contexts of humanitarian
emergency but the day-​to-​day realities of most people.
What this means is that attention should be focused on the relationships and respon-
sibilities that facilitite the giving and receiving of care—​within households, extended
families, communities, and wider social groupings. This means asking new and different
questions: how do these communities attend to and manage care—​of children, of the
elderly, the disabled, the acutely and chronically ill? How is this labour distributed—​
according to gender, race, and class? Is the provision of care adequate and fairly distrib-
uted, or lacking and exploitative? How have relations of care broken down as a result
of crises, or of the background events leading up to these crises? A feminist practical
ethics of care, in the context of global humanitarianism (see Chapter 22), focuses on
historical and existing care practices, as well as potential solutions to care crises. And if
these practices conform more to the “realities” of women than to men, this reveals not
something essential about their nature, but more about the resilience of androcentric
norms in valuing and regulating social life, and obliterating the significance of arrang-
ments which provide care for the very young, sick, and elderly (Truong, Wieringa, and
Chhachhi 2006: xxi).
A critical ethics of care functions as a feminist practical international ethics in two
senses. First, it emphasizes a different voice of morality—​one that has been routinely
 A Feminist Practical Ethics of Care    565

silenced by dominant accounts of moral development and one that has been found to
be heard in, and to resonate with, many women. To make this claim is not to suggest
some sort of innate or biologically determined “women’s” morality, but rather that cul-
tural norms of gender have contributed to the feminizing of this voice. For Gilligan, lis-
tening to and taking seriously the voices of women was an important feminist move.
But care ethics is feminist in a second sense. This sense involves the next step of care
thinking—​thinking politically about how and why this moral voice—​of care, connec-
tion, and context—​had been systematically silenced. This involves not only addressing
the feminization of care but also asking why and how men are less inclined to speak the
language of care and take on the labour of caring, and addressing the forces which define
masculinity in ways that exclude relationality and care.
A critical feminist ethics of care focuses on the moral challenge of listening atten-
tively to all of those whose needs exist, intertwined, in a given time and place. While we
cannot respond to the all of the needs of everyone, the task is to judge with care by con-
sidering who will be harmed or isolated by our actions or policies in a given, particular
context. “We” make these judgements from the privileged position of the humanitarian
responder—​but we do so in the full knowledge that this position is precarious and con-
tingent. While the privilege of the humanitarian responder may seem secure—​given her
citizenship, education, and affluence—​the lens of care reminds us that we are all beings
who rely on the care of others throughout our lives.
Despite the promise of an ethic of care as a practical ethics of humanitarianism, the
language of care is thick with meanings and associations that inevitably precede it. First
is the claim that a caring approach to humanitarianism will necesssarily be paternal-
istic. Certainly, by its very nature, care is rarely an activity engaged in by equals. There
is always implicit in care, then, the danger that those who receive care will lose their
autonomy and their sense of independence (Tronto 1993: 147). While this concern is
relevant at the level of personal relations among individuals, it also resonates in the con-
text of international politics. In 1995, Uma Narayan addressed what she called the “self-​
serving collaboration between elements of colonial rights discourse and care discourse”
(Narayan 1995: 133). While she is not suggesting an equivalence between the discourses
of colonialism and care ethics, she does argue that the terms of the paternalistic coloni-
alist “care discourse” have some resonance with those of some contemporary strands
of the ethic of care (p. 133). Furthermore, in his work on humanitarian governance,
Michael Barnett has argued that the international community is increasingly organized
to preserve, protect, and promote human life, reflecting an ethics of care and impulse
to intervene for a greater good (Barnett 2012: 485). The norms, laws, actors, and institu-
tions of the contemporary international humanitarian order are nestled, he argues, in
discourses of compassion, responsibility, and care; the mixture of care and control that
defines humanitarian governance points to the presence of paternalism (pp. 486–​7).
A second critique of “care” suggests that a focus on care will obscure the possibil-
ity of political solutions to wider, structural injustices which are the source of most
humanitarian crises. In her discussion of immigration and humanitarianism in France,
Miriam Ticktin critiques the process by which immigration, “a political issue of the
566   Fiona Robinson

highest order, has come to be managed in significant ways by sentiments and practices
of care and compassion” (Ticktin 2011: 5). Here she is referring to what she sees as the
central place of benevolence and compassion in contemporary political life, especially
when enacted under the threat of emergency or crisis, as solutions to global problems of
inequality, exploitation, and discrimination. Her argument is that these regimes of care
ultimately work to displace possibilities for larger forms of collective change, particu-
larly for those most disenfranchised. Indeed, she describes this politics of care as a form
of “antipolitics” (p. 5).
These arguments raise important challenges for a feminist ethic of care as a practical
ethics of humanitarianism. However, I would argue that they rely on a particular read-
ing of care ethics as a prescription for benevolent or charitable “do-​gooding” for a spe-
cific group of human beings who are regarded as acutely or chronically “vulnerable” or
“needy.” My view of a critical feminist ethic of care—​supported by the work of many
theorists of care—​eschews this view in favour of a political ethic of care that is attentive
to relations and structures of power—​including, but not limited to, those based on gen-
der relations. The critical lens of care ethics exposes the ways in which dominant norms
and discourses sustain existing power relations that lead to inequalities in the way that
societies determine how and on what bases care will be given and received (Robinson
2011: 28). Moreover, it views the interrogation of the association of women with the val-
ues and virtues of caring as integral to the feminist enterprise (p. 33). As a critical fem-
inist theory, care ethics has the resources to counter the challenges that it is paternalistic
and apolitical.
First, while paternalism is certainly a potential danger of some readings of an ethics
of care, an ethics of care that is both critical and feminist is oriented towards a critique of
the sociopolitical conditions—​both material and semiotic—​that construct the gendered
dyad between “carer” and “cared-​for” in the world. As Tronto points out, this image is
not only inaccurate, it has bad consequences. Indeed, it begins to “import into the very
nature of care its inequality” (Tronto 2013: 152–​3). It obscures the fact that care-​givers
are also care-​receivers, and that they too are vulnerable, needy, and sometimes incom-
petent. And it can serve as a justification for continuing to exclude and not think about
care-​receivers and their close care-​givers as full, participating citizens (Tronto 2013: 152–​
3). I argue, with Marian Barnes, that it is neither empirically accurate nor morally
defensible—​in this context and in others—​to define people as only givers or receivers of
care. Barnes insists that the “political argument needs to be about care and the necessity
and value of care, rather than the comparative merits of protecting the rights and inter-
ests of those who are currently ‘dependent’ or ‘independent’ ” (Barnes 2012: 178).
Moving beyond criticism of the potential for paternalism in care ethics, scholars
are increasingly seeking to articulate an ethics of care which not only avoids paternal-
ism but also actually combats it in practice. Writing about paternalism in development
practice, Serene Khader has argued that within care ethics lie a set of “epistemic vir-
tues” that enable carers to perceive conflicts between their views of the other’s good
and what is actually in the other’s best interests. In particular, she cites the “transpar-
ent self,” “narrative understanding,” and “loving attention” as aspects of an ethic of care
 A Feminist Practical Ethics of Care    567

that may help development practioners work against their own paternalistic inclina-
tions (Khader 2011: 744). Similarly, I have argued elsewhere that, in order to avoid the
harms of paternalism, globalized care practices must be mindful to integrate strategies
that are “transformative” of the conditions under which roles of “carer” and “cared for”
are constructed, edified, and performed (Robinson 2016a). While these strategies might
include simple reflection and reflexivity on one’s own subject-​position, inherent vulner-
ability, and past and current care needs, they could also include subversive representa-
tions of the politics of aid and humanitarianism, as presented in popular satiric videos of
aid and development (see Robinson 2016a).
Second, while the ethics of care offers a different perspective on morality and moral
judgement, it is also very much a starting point for thinking about an alternative polit-
ics. Thus, the view of care as “antipolitics” results from a reading of care as benevolent
compassion for those less fortunate—​the needy, the sick, the infirm, the weak. But care
ethicists have rejected this view of care, arguing instead that, as a political concept, care
helps us to rethink humans as interdependent, vulnerable beings (Tronto 1993: 21). In
the context of humanitarian responses, this means not only prioritizing the giving and
receiving of care in the moment of crisis but also asking how social, political, and eco-
nomic conditions in various locales are affecting the ability of people to give and receive
care. This means paying close attention to relations of gender. As Jody Heymann’s
research has shown, while men and boys are clearly affected by economic insecurity,
the burden of care-​giving is disproportionately carried by women and girls (Heymann
2006: 126). Responses to humanitarian crisis must seek to attend to need wherever we
find it, but also ask what kinds of socioeconomic structures and norms create the condi-
tions in which care is given and received.

From The Responsibility to Protect

to One Humanity

In this final section, I address what is could be described as the key normative statement
on international humanitarianism of the early twentieth century: The Responsibility to
Protect—​the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty. I then contrast R2P with the 2016 Report of the UN Secretary-​General for
the World Humanitarian Summit, One Humanity: Shared Responsibility. I argue that,
while far from perfect or a panacea, the One Humanity document moves in the direction
of understanding humanitarianism from the perspective of an ethics of care, and in so
doing, progresses beyond some of the problematic elements of the R2P. One Humanity
offers some recognition of the relational context in which people live their lives, the
need for long-​term engagement rather than protection in a moment of crisis, and the
ways in which moral claims and responsibilities are always embedded in “the political,”
rather than in an impartial “view from nowhere.”
568   Fiona Robinson

Throughout the R2P report, a clear dichotomy is drawn between the international
community and the local context in which conflict is occurring. Written in the after-
math of the end of the Cold War and haunted by the failures of Rwanda and Srebrenica,
the report asserts the moral responsibility of the rational, prosperous West in the con-
text of the New World Order. Indeed, the discursive tropes are quite striking; complex
conflicts happen in “distant lands” (ICISS 2001: 5), where states are “unwilling or unable”
to protect their people (p. 11). Even in arguing that conflict prevention is more than
“merely a national or local affair,” and paying lip-​service to the implication of the “rich
world” in intra-​state warfare in the global South, the report maintains the dichotomy
between “local” and the “international,” where the latter is associated with strong states
with the capacity for protection. Not only does it fail to elucidate the extent to which the
“local” is always, already bound up with the so-​called “international,” but it effaces the
complex, power-​ridden, and often life-​sustaining relations that constitute “the local.”
The narrative of “prevention” found in the report suggests that the focus of respon-
sibilities across borders be directed towards preventing conflict (as opposed to build-
ing relations of mutual respect and responsiveness). But, more telling than this, it is
also suggested that these so-​called “preventative” actions are important because they
build credibility, which will be important when “international action must go beyond
prevention to reaction, and especially when that reaction necessarily involves coercive
measures, and ultimately the use of armed force” (ICISS 2001: 19, emphasis added). The
implications are quite clear here: that any kind of “prevention” will probably be futile,
and that the focus is on the moment when military intervention becomes necessary.
It should be noted that the report of the ICISS eschews the term “humanitarian”—​or
at least avoids using it in conjunction with the term “intervention.” Responding to the
“very strong opposition” expressed by humanitarian organizations towards the mili-
tarization of the word “humanitarian,” the report refers repeatedly to “intervention for
human protection purposes” (ICISS 2001: 11). Furthermore, the authors of the report
claim that, in shifting the terms from “right to intervene” to “responsibility to protect,”
they are shifting the point of view from the powerful to “those seeking or needing sup-
port.” The logic of this claim is difficult to follow, since it is “those who may be consider-
ing intervention” who are still the subjects of the phrase “responsibility to protect” (see
Chapters 24 and 25); it is they, the rational, heroic moral actors who have the capability,
the autonomy and responsibility to protect the others, the objects of global politics—​
women who need to be protected from “systematic rape” and children who need
protection from “starvation” (p. 17). Indeed, everywhere in this document, the “protect-
ors”—​the armed interveners—​are the agents of global politics; it is they who have their
“consciences shocked” (p. 55) by humanitarian crises. The final sentence of the docu-
ment demonstrates this most vividly, revealling a key reason why military intervention
is necessary: “We won’t be able to live with ourselves if we do not” (p. 75).
A global ethic of care, by contrast, rejects the strict delineation between the global
and the local that characterizes this account of global politics and humanitarianism.
It also eschews the violent, top-​down, paternalistic, and gendered approach to human
insecurity. Rather than focusing on a discrete moment of violent disruption, an ethic
of care understands moral responsiveness in terms of long-​term engagement that takes
 A Feminist Practical Ethics of Care    569

seriously the oppressive forces of gender, race, and class, and which views violence as a
continuum rather than an isolated event.
One Humanity—​the already-​controversial report from UN Secretary-​General Ban
Ki-​moon in preparation for the 2016 Humanitarian Summit—​moves towards a greater
recognition of the “daily struggles” of people to improve life “for themselves and for
their families” (UN 2016: 5–​6). Furthermore, it emphasizes that humanitarian assistance
“will never be the solution and deployments of peacekeepers will not be enough” (p. 8),
pointing out that the demand for short-​term, measurable results has thwarted “early
and sustained engagement that is focused on prevention and peacebuilding in coun-
tries most at risk of conflict” (p. 8). While this point has been controversial—​prompting
the key humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières to drop out of the sum-
mit in protest—​it is important to search for the intention behind this move. There is no
evidence to suggest that the objective here is to withdraw funding and support entirely
from humanitarian organizations. Rather, the aim seems to be a need to recognize that
greater attention to long-​term needs—​notably, through building capacity and invest-
ment in local actors—​may ultimately serve to reduce the need for humanitarian assist-
ance and intervention.
Despite its title—​which is problematic for its erasure of difference, including gen-
der difference—​One Humanity also diverges from the rationalist, liberal-​cosmopolitan
rhetoric of R2P, relying less on the gendered moral heroics of protection and rescue,
and making a greater effort to recognize gender and diversity as constitutive of different
forms of oppression and exclusion. Core Responsibility Three, “Leave no one behind,”
argues:

Women and girls may suffer mutliple forms of discrimination in a crisis if they are dis-
placed, migrants, in an ethnic minority, stateless or have disabilities. Discrimination
also often leaves them without access to crucial health-​care, legal and psychosocial
services and safe and sufficient livelihood opportunities. (UN 2016: 21)

The tone of this report does not mirror the gendered paternalism of R2P; indeed, there
is a sense of outrage, but also an undertone of culpability. What is lacking is the making
explicit of that culpability, and of the historical and ongoing relations that constitute
“global North” and “global South.” Finally, while the recognition of gender discrimin-
ation is welcome, more emphasis must be placed on the quotidian responsibilities of
care, carried out largely by women, throughout the world, and the link between the abil-
ity to care and the “regnant tendency in neo-​liberal reforms which tends to apply pri-
marily male norms in valuing and regulating social life” (Truong et al. 2006: xxi).

Conclusion

In this chapter I have sought to build a picture of a practical feminist international eth-
ics based on the ethics of care. I have argued that care ethics’ attention to context, its
570   Fiona Robinson

emphasis on moral practices rather than principles, and its feminist orientation all con-
tribute to its inherently practical nature. That said, as a practical ethics, care ethics does
not supply a list of rules, rights, or obligations that can be applied to different moral
situations. Rather, the ethics of care challenges the distinction between “theory” and
“practice” in ethics, conceiving of ethics as “socially embedded” in quotidian practices
of attentiveness and responsiveness to others.
As a practical ethics informing humanitarian policy and practice, the ethics of care
offers an alternative to cosmopolitan impartiality. Care ethics can act as a guide for
moral reasoning involved in making decisions and policy—​emphasizing the need to
judge with humility, paying attention to the implications of judgements on past and
present relationships, and recognizing the need to adapt policies to changing contexts.
This involves, as Raghuram argues, the need to consider how global care is being made
up differently through the multiple forms of care arrangements and conceptualizations
throughout the globe (Raghuram 2012: 170). The ethics of care thus also offers a sub-
stantive focus for policy and practice around diverse and competing needs for care. Far
from confining women to their roles as carers, this approach exposes patterns of gender
inequality in care practices, while retaining a focus on the contribution of the voice and
labour of care—​in multiple and diverse forms—​for all social groups and communities.

Note
1. Kimberly Hutchings (2007b) offers a useful typology of feminist ethics; “enlightenment”
feminist ethics, associated with liberal and socialist feminisms; “care” ethics, associated
with radical feminisms; and “postcolonial” feminist ethics, associated with “difference fem-
inisms.” Notwithstanding the difficulties of reducing complex and interrelated theories to a
typology, this does offer a useful framework for thinking about different approaches to eth-
ics within feminism.

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Caney, S. (2010). Cosmopolitanism. In D. Bell (ed.), Ethics and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 146–​63.
CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) (2003). Gender Equality and
Humanitarian Assistance: A Guide to the Issues (Gatineau: CIDA).
Edkins, J. (2003). Humanitarianism, Humanity, Human. Journal of Human Rights 2(2): 253–​8.
Fierke, K. (2014). Who Is My Neighbour? Memories of the Holocaust/​al Nakba and a Global
Ethic of Care. European Journal of International Relations 20(3): 787–​809.
Gilligan, C. (1993). In a Different Voice, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global (Oxford: Oxford University
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Sullivan (eds), Globalization of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 171–​90.
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Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre).
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Care. Global Networks 12(2): 155–​74.
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Truong, T.-​D., S. Wieringa, and A. Chhachhi (eds) (2006). Engendering Human Security:
Feminist Perspectives (London: Pluto Press).
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 Pa rt V I I I

N E W DI R E C T ION S
I N I N T E R NAT IONA L
P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY
 ­c hapter 43

Jud geme nt
A Conceptual Sketch

Friedrich Kratochwil

Considering that the problem of judgement is nearly ubiquitous in social life, at first
sight it seems odd that it has received relatively little attention. One reason, of course
is, that judgements are required from us in a variety of contexts involving choices, and
to that extent first impressions might be misleading. We talk about (mis)perceptions,
about “tastes” or preferences, about inferences or subsumptions, highlighting differ-
ent factors, such as cognition, desires, standards of taste, and self-​chosen maxims, all of
which are aspects of judgement.
Traditionally the problem of judgement has been dealt with in terms of logic, i.e. how
the particular and the general relate to each other, with the general provided the justi-
fication for the judgement. Here Kant distinguished between a “determinative judge-
ment,” which makes the conclusion necessary and compelling, such as in the inference
that Socrates is mortal since all men are mortal, and a “reflective judgement” which
is only persuasive, since the “general” is not available (Kant 2009: introduction, sect.
4). But although putting the problem within a logical framework has a certain heur-
istic value, it creates several conceptual problems for “political judgements,” as I show
below. There are three reasons why Kant’s focus on logic and patterns of inference is too
narrow.
First, as game theory suggests, there might be several determinative solutions, i.e.
multiple equilibria, which are logically equivalent but do not tell us on which equilib-
rium to settle. Thus, strangely enough, multiple equilibria produce both determinate
and indeterminate choices, given Kant’s conception of practical reason, which does
not allow for any influence of the “factual” (or, in logical terms, of the particular) to
contribute to finding the appropriate universal, which would provide the necessary
force for the determinative judgement. Kant examines the logical structure of reflective
judgements in his Third Critique, taking aesthetic judgement as his paradigm, which
Arendt takes as the ground for claiming that Kant’s political philosophy could be
reconstructed on this basis (Arendt 1982). This thesis has spawned the recent interest
576   Friedrich Kratochwil

in an aesthetic approach to politics (Bleiker 2009; Strong 2012). However, I am not

convinced that relying on the formal notion of indeterminacy, exemplified by aesthetic
appraisals, is fruitful for the analysis of politics, unless some further, more substan-
tive elements—​something like Aristotle’s phronesis or Hume’s “common sense”—​are
introduced.
This leads me to my second point. The particular which practical choices have to
address is not only logically part of a larger whole or system, but is situated in a con-
junctural sequence of actions set in kairotic time (what is possible today was not pos-
sible yesterday and might no longer be possible tomorrow). Consequently action cannot
be reduced to an atemporal logical relation. This realization imposes new demands on
actors, particularly when collective action is involved. They not only have to deliberate
together, but are also driven by the need to act. Individual plans have therefore to mesh,
and collective intentions have to be formed. These problems remain largely invisible if
we focus only on formal logical relations.
Third, the realization of our freedom—​that we can set things in motion and create
new causal chains instead of being determined by them—​opens up options where
we have to take chances, and make decisions for which we individually and collect-
ively bear responsibility. This predicament engenders the possibility of triumph, of
showing who we are, but also contains the possibility of (tragic) failure, with all its
anxieties. The latter might lead either to indifference and despair, which Hume men-
tions, or the “weakness/​rashness of will” problem, which Aristotle analysed (Hume
1978; see also Livingston 1998: Aristotle 2014: bk VII, 1–​10; see also Davidson 1980).
In this way we became alienated from ourselves, but might content ourselves with
functioning like “cogs in a machine,” while hanging on to the illusion of being part of
“something big.”
From this starting point, in the next section I examine the problem of what Kant calls
the “strange capacity,” Urteilskraft (judgement, or power of judgement). In the third
section I broaden the analysis by examining a concept of practical reason that is more
indebted to the classical analysis of Aristotle, but also draws on Hume, Wittgenstein,
Arendt, and “experimental philosophy”; and in the fourth section I try to bring these
considerations to bear on the analysis of political judgement.

The (In)formality of Judgement:

Stupidity vs the Ability to “Go On”

Kant dealt first with the problem of judgement in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he
considered it to be a necessary ability of people when they use rules in practical contexts.
He calls this capacity Urteilskraft (good judgement, often also translated as the “power of
judgement”). Although Kant speaks of “subsumption” in this context, his elaborations
show that that something else is going on than simply engaging in a syllogistic operation.
 Judgement: A Conceptual Sketch   577

In a significant footnote he avers: “The lack of judgement [Urteilskraft] is actually what

we call stupidity [Dummheit] and such a flaw [Gebrechen] cannot be cured” (Kant 1999:
A134, 135; B173, 174). The subsequent discussion makes it also clear this “stupidity” has
nothing to do with a lack of reason. Rather, it seems to affect the intelligent and dull
alike, academics not excluded. The problem is:

if (logic) wanted to show how one should subsume, or distinguish whether some-
thing falls under a rule or not , this could be done only through further rules. But this
again would require a new determination by the power of judgement [Urteilskraft]
because a rule is involved. Thus it is evident that the understanding [Verstand] is
capable of being instructed by supplying it with rules, but that the power of judge-
ment is a special talent [Talent], which cannot be taught, but can be acquired only
by practice. For that reason [this faculty] is a specific quality of common sense
[Mutterwitz], whose lack no school can cure. Although schooling might be able fur-
nish rules derived from the insights of others and might [even be able] to somehow
“implant” them in a limited mind, the capacity to apply them correctly must be in
“apprentice” [Lehrling] himself. No rule, which we prescribe to him with this inten-
tion, is secure from abuse, if such a talent is missing. Consequently, a physician or
judge, or statesman might have in their heads many beautiful rules for pathologies,
laws, or politics—​so that they could even become competent teachers of them—​but
they could as easily violate these rules in applying them, because they either lack this
power of judgement, even if they possess understanding and can discern the gen-
eral in abstracto but lack the discrimination of whether a concrete case falls under
it, or because their judgement has not been sufficiently exercised by practice and
examples. Indeed it is the unique and great advantage of examples that they sharpen
the judgement. As to the correctness and precision of the understanding, examples
are frequently injurious because they, as casus in terminis, examples seldom meet the
conditions of the rule and because they frequently also weaken those efforts of our
understanding [Verstand] to apprehend rules in their generality , independent of
their particular circumstance of experience, and thus accustom us to use them more
as formulae than as principles. Thus examples become the prosthesis [Gaengelwagen]
of judgements, which someone who lacks this natural talent can never do without.
(Kant 1999: B172–​4, A133–​5, trans. FK)

This passage provides much food for thought and is susceptible to different interpret-
ations. On the one hand there is a nearly classical statement resembling Wittgenstein’s
argument about “training,” i.e. learning by doing, but on the other, we encounter again
a hidden longing for the “general,” i.e. for understanding rule-​following “independent
of their particular circumstance of experience” (Bloor 1997; 2000). Obviously some
unpacking is needed.
First, what is uncontroversial is Kant’s recognition that applying rules is not tanta-
mount to logical subsumption. His distinction of stupidity and common sense is too
striking to be put aside. Similarly, his fallback on practice and experience is telling. Only
in this way can we circumvent the problem of the semantic openness of rules, which
would otherwise prevent us from “going on.” For example, we need not think long and
578   Friedrich Kratochwil

hard why the prohibition “No dogs on the escalator” means dogs in general. I must be a
real idiot, i.e. caught up in my own world, if, after having got onto the escalator with my
dog Ulysses, I claim that I am being ticketed unjustly, since Ulysses is one dog only. And
we also understand why this interpretation can be extended to live animals in general,
thus being valid for cats and boa constrictors, while a budgerigar in a cage arguably does
not fall under the rule.
The reason why we are able to cut such arguments short is simple: we have been
trained by the many instances of “dos” and “don’ts” during our socialization, and under-
stand what “following a rule” means. That those largely implicit understandings do not
end all controversies and might even escalate some of them—​particularly when seem-
ingly higher-​order principles are invoked—​is surprising only for those who think that
rules work like causes, ensuring uniformity in a more or less mechanical fashion, very
much like a cookie-​cutter or hole-​punch (Kratochwil 2014). However, the capacity to
“go on,” acquired through participation in social life, is different even though it is not a
technique, precisely because no algorithm for its application exists. As Kant reminds us,
even the expertise of rule-​handlers (law professors and judges included) is no guarantee
that idiocies will be avoided.
The misuse of expertise suggests that Kant’s focus on the formal criteria, i.e. the tran-
scendental presuppositions that endow our judgements with validity, might be too
restrictive even within his own remit. This makes it doubtful whether the Critique of
Judgement provides an apt analogy for politics, as Arendt suggested, notwithstanding
the fact that both aesthetic and political judgements are about particulars (Arendt 1982).
Furthermore, both necessitate the free play of imagination more than formal analytic
powers. Kant himself is clearly uneasy about political judgements—​he often comes close
to submerging politics into morality—​precisely because he considers moral judgements
to be simple when compared to prudential ones that rely on experience. This certainty
is based on the imputation of a teleology to nature that plays itself out behind the back
of the actors in a universal history that has “mankind” as its subject (Kant 1991). But this
construct sits quite uneasily with his own emphasis on the autonomy and responsibil-
ity of the subject. In short, while there certainly are some important analogies between
politics and aesthetics, the more fitting analogy is with law and reasoning with rules
and principles. For that purpose I want to begin in the next section with some remarks
on reasoning with rules and higher-​order principles, in order to illuminate the role the
“particular” plays in this process.
This endeavour leads us back to a conception of practical reason that comes closer to
Aristotle’s notion of practical reasoning, but is also indebted to modern conceptions of
how we go about making practical choices as suggested by Hume’s conventionalism and
Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” (Wittgenstein 1953). One implication of my argu-
ment is that philosophy’s task can no longer be foundationalist, universal, and trans-​
historical, but has to become practical. Its mission is, therefore, the critical examination
of the historical “common world” whose reproduction is entrusted to us, as an Aufgabe
(charge) which we cannot leave unattended even though we cannot grasp it in terms of a
theoretical understanding of what there “is” (Livingston 1984).
 Judgement: A Conceptual Sketch   579

Prudence, Cases, and Ordinary

Language

Rules safeguarding social utility against idiosyncratic preferences have to be more gen-
eral than the various cases to which they apply; but they are not more general in the
sense of simply being more abstract, as this would empty them of content and impair
their capacity to help us. They are more general in the sense of capturing some typical
features of recurring situations. Thus, they represent types, which attain meaning from
the distinctions; we try to fit them to the “fact pattern” of a case, such as distinguishing
fraud from error, or liability from criminal intent. The task consists then in looking for
supporting evidence why one typification fits better than the other. So the point is not
the generality of the logical form, but rather the recognized interest that both lets us
make the distinctions and lump instances together. We also reason often from “case to
case”—​without using general rules or universal principles. Then analogies, metaphors,
hypotheticals, knowing the relevant exceptions and the circumstances which make a
rule defeasible, or engaging in counterfactual reasoning are the proper conceptual tools
(Tetlock and Belkin 1996). The general scope of a rule serves mostly to distinguish it as
a “standing order” (i.e. stating its potential applicability to future situations) rather than
a situation-​specific command, which positivists considered the defining characteristic
of law. But this generality is of little help when the issue arises of how to apply a rule (or
which rule to apply) to a case (see Hart 1961).
Perhaps the common law and its use of precedents provides a better model for reason-
ing with rules and making judgements of applicability. Consider the case of Donaghue
v. Stevenson, which changed the general rule of Caveat emptor in English law, opening
the door for product liability. In this case a woman had bought some ginger beer that
turned out to contain a dead snail. She became violently sick and suffered serious after-​
effects. She sued the manufacturer and the latter asked for dismissal, based on the pre-
cedent of “Buyer beware” in common law.1 The court, however, held the defendant liable
for compensation. But despite the clear decision of the court, it did not settle whether
the ratio decidendi establishing a new precedent was valid only for juices in opaque bot-
tles or for all juices, or for food in general (because of its special importance to health)
without changing the Caveat emptor rule in other areas (which ones?). Or was the
change intended for all products? Although the facts and the rule are obviously related,
the relationship cannot be one of simple entailment, since both are equally subject to
contestation: the generality of the rule is as problematic as are the facts.
Aristotle, therefore, argues that it is not the truth (aletheia) but only some form of
fit or correct ascription (orthothes) that can be achieved (Aristotle 2014: 1140 a10, VI
3,103: 1144b 18–​31). The distinction between the factual assertions in the minor prem-
ise and the general norm of the major one (which provides the normative pull) breaks
down. This is why Aristotle thinks that young people, although not lacking in intelli-
gence and formal reasoning, are unlikely to have the necessary experience for making
580   Friedrich Kratochwil

well-​considered practical choices, all things considered (Aristotle 2014: bk I, iii, 5 (1095
a1–​10). This way of putting the problem differs significantly from holding that the rule or
principle, in virtue of its generality and having received the imprimatur of reason, solves
the problem by subsuming the relevant facts under principle. That the latter interpret-
ation of the role of norms is rather misleading is evidenced by the fact that the problem
of judgement arises on both levels: on the major premise (which facts are relevant in the
light of a norm?) and on the level of the relevant facts for selecting the appropriate rule
or principle or making exceptions.
It seems that when we reason about practical problems, general rules, and transcen-
dental principles actually do very little, “ideal theory” (see Chapter 50) notwithstand-
ing. This is what Aristotle suggested in criticizing Plato’s “idea of the good.” Since “good”
is predicated across various categories,

there cannot a common Idea corresponding to the absolutely good and the relative
good. Again the word “good” is used in as many senses as the word “is” [ . . . ] So
clearly “good” cannot be a single and universal notion; if it were it would not be pred-
icable in all Categories, but only in one. Again things that come under a single Idea
must be objects of a single science, hence there ought to be a single science dealing
with all good things. But [ . . . ] there are a number of sciences that deal with the
“good” (in time), i.e. the opportunity [kairos], which in war comes under the science
of strategy, in disease under that of medicine [ . . . ] in bodily exercise under gymnas-
tics. (Aristotle 2014: 1096a 24–​35)

How much the fact pattern and its variation contributes to the “discovery” of the applic-
able general principle can also be gathered from the “trolley problem” in philosophy.
This hypothetical concerns a trolley, which is running out of control towards, five people
tied to or working on the track. Fortunately, you stand at a switching point and could
throw the switch and divert it to a side-​track where there is only one person who is
in jeopardy. Should you move the switch and save the five persons, knowing that the
person on the side-​track will be killed due to your action? Should, or even “could” you
stay out of it and do nothing? Is this omission reprehensible since on consequentialist
grounds you should chose the lesser evil? As you can do something about it, you should
pull the switch. But can you prescribe this as a general maxim for action? It might be
true that “ought implies can,” but does can imply “ought”? What if stopping the trolley
could also be accomplished by pushing a “fat man” standing next to you onto the tracks,
which might derail the trolley, thereby saving then six people on both tracks, while sac-
rificing only one? Have you done better in that case?
Unfortunately, then you might be charged with homicide, while in the case of no
action you go free (and the only penalty you pay is perhaps your bad conscience). But
could you get off simply by invoking the principle of maximizing overall utility and sav-
ing more lives? What other principles become relevant? After all, why do we condemn
a surgeon who kills the victim of an accident with slim chances of survival in order
to transplant the intact organs to his other patients, thereby saving their lives? While
rights cut short any overall utility calculations and we intuitively feel that the two cases
 Judgement: A Conceptual Sketch   581

are different, this “intuition” is not that of an universal order of things, or of ultimate
values, but probably more like a gut reaction to the threats if such actions were to be
allowed. Or is this hypothetical the proof for the superiority of a Kantian deontology
and of universal principles? Here again, I am not sure whether the answer is as clear-​cut
as it appears.
First, while rights certainly trump the act-​utilitarian “eager beavers” parading their
felicific calculus, similar problems can also arise at the level of rights, when conflict-
ing duties have to be assessed, such as when doctors have to decide whom to save and
give the scarce medicines to. Should they reserve them for those who are most likely
to survive, distribute them fairly to all, or according to need, or dispense them on the
“first come first served” basis? How are we to evaluate Churchill’s decision to set up an
intelligence operation letting the Germans believe that their V2s were hitting northwest
London rather than the centre, which he knew would lead them to reduce fuel and hit
poor neighbourhoods to the southeast of the city (Edmonds 2015)?
Whatever we think about these hypotheticals, they contain a few important mes-
sages. One is that the dichotomy between duty and its opposite is too indiscriminate
to allow conclusions in any half-​way complicated case. But that implies that the ques-
tion whether the throwing of the switch was demanded (on utilitarian grounds), or for-
bidden (arguably on Kantian grounds), or permissible (thus being neither a duty nor a
fault), or it represented an exception (excuse) or only a mitigating circumstance (to be
taken into consideration only in the punishment), cannot be determined by the norms
themselves, since a slight variation of the facts makes different norms relevant and puts
them in different relations vis-​à-​vis each other.

Judgement and Politics

The above discussion has made several points. One is that the practical problems an
agent faces are not simple optimization problems, since the evaluation of choice also
extends over time and the relevant time horizon is an entire life—​and a “fulfilled or
happy life” has dimensions other than simply “getting” a pre-​existing good. This fact not
only defeats a simple maximization strategy, it also alerts us that the problem is not sim-
ply one of distribution where, perhaps, the “smart” get more of a pre-​existing good than
others. Happiness is not only multi-​dimensional, encompassing various spheres; it is
also episodic, rather than representing a continuum in which one “lumpy good,” meas-
urable in terms of just one medium, can be accumulated.
A second important point is that happiness is gained by acting well through deliber-
ation and choice. But choices are always embedded in particular conjunctures in which
diagnosing the relevant points and drawing on analogies presupposes familiarity with
a concrete society and its conventions. Thus characterizing an action as base, such as a
fraud (rather than an error), or as a trespass (rather than an observable jump across a
fence), presupposes that we are familiar with the norms and with how to use them.
582   Friedrich Kratochwil

This does not mean that our ascriptions have to be “determinate” in a Kantian sense.
Rather, they involve us in a hermeneutic circle. The facts have to fit the adduced norm,
and the latter gains relevance in the light of the “facts,” so that the vetting of a case is
characterized by going back and forth between norms and facts and not by simple gen-
eralization or deductive subsumption. Rather, the “fit,” which can claim assent, relies,
(as Gadamer 1976 suggested) on the shared understandings of a particular audience to
which such an appraisal is directed.
Third, as in the case of the individual actions, which have to be placed and appraised
in the context of an entire “life,” political choices must be vetted in terms of the com-
munity as a whole and its projects and place in the world. Here, conceptual problems
abound. Without a clearly bounded community and functioning institutions having the
competence to decide which goods in what magnitude and priority are to be provided,
an appraisal of the “common good” seems impossible. It is unrealizable not because it is
an ideal, and ideals are always hard to match up with reality, but because it is incoherent.
It raises the same conceptual difficulties that Aristotle mentioned in the individual
case, when the family and friends are “counted in,” establishing the self-​sufficiency of
eudaimonia as the overarching “end” of all action.

The term “self-​sufficient,” however, we employ with reference not to oneself alone,
living a life in isolation, but also one’s parents, children and wife, and one’s friend and
fellow citizen in general, since man is by nature a political animal. On the other hand
a limit has to be assumed [ . . . ] for the list to be extended to one’s ancestors and des-
cendant and to the friend of one’s friends; it will go ad infinitum. (Aristotle 2014: bk
I, vii 7, 1097b 8–​15)

Furthermore, since communities are trans-​generational associations, matters are com-

plicated not only by the question of who belongs in and who is not part of it, but also by
the time-​frame within which these problems have to be placed. It is now easy to see why
these aporias engender certain conceptual short cuts that seem to provide solutions.
First, while, of course, the term “community” can be stretched to include all human-
ity, which we encounter in the Stoic cosmopolis and in Kant’s notion of “mankind” as the
subject of a universal history, those imperial visions based on the logical extension of the
concept of community run foul of practical experience. Empires rise and decay, and the
anticipation of a teleology of nature depends more on “prophecy” (even if communi-
cated in the argot of a secular philosophy of history) than on the experience of building
an actual historical common world (Kratochwil 2014).
Second, if we want to be more realistic and accept the plurality of polities, then one
short cut consists in postulating their “survival” as such an overarching or “self-​sufficient
end.” But, as the discussion among realists has shown, even “survival” is an ambiguous
symbol, and the survival of the members of such an association raises different issues
from the survival of the form of life itself. People do not always choose “bare life” over
the good life, as attested by the persistence of wars and violent conflict.
Third, overarching goals are hardly apt for settling concrete practical questions.
They represent rather the horizon within which a variety of goals can be meaningfully
 Judgement: A Conceptual Sketch   583

pursued—​as the notion of a fulfilled life suggested. Precisely because the social world
is not there but is being “made,” two further conceptual gambits arise. One reduces the
problem of praxis to techne, i.e. understands action in terms of the production of an
object in order to provide clear end–​means chains. Postulating this end can then be jus-
tified either by a special type of knowledge or by mere “authority,” such as commission-
ing the Hobbesian sovereign to make such choices “for us all” (see Chapter 2). Ideally, we
could distinguish a discursive and a technical way of deciding, the former relying largely
on “common sense,” the latter on expert knowledge, as prefigured in the Platonic/​
Aristotelian controversy. While Plato invokes the technical knowledge of the captain as
a template for steering the ship of state, Aristotle wants broader participation in order
to ensure that an issue is considered from a variety of angles and those who interests are
affected get a hearing, thus allowing the informed public (euboulia) to make a choice
(Aristotle 2014: bk VI, 10, 2; 1143 a 5–​10).
Here new difficulties arise, as these choices have to be made in irreversible time, and
we can neither wait until all information is in nor afford to continue our discussions ad
infinitum. Thus, things cannot be so neatly separated, as e.g. the communicative action
paradigm seems to suggest. In actual arguments, instrumental and discursive strategies
interact and a prudent choice cannot be blind to experiential evidence; and reductionist
attempts to simplify matters, such as arguing about “functional” necessities, or welfare
gains, nust be subject to critical appraisal.
The temptation to see the practical world in terms of an ends/​means scheme is highly
problematic; hence the clockwork imagery in which all wheels and springs work in tan-
dem and according to the design is essentially misleading. We know that even in deter-
minate systems small variations can lead to vastly different results. Equifinality and
multiple realizability have complicated our “causal” understanding considerably, and
should have made us suspicious of the “predictability” of complex systems. Similarly, the
discussion of intelligence failures shows that most of them are not simply the outcome
of bad luck, or of having assigned a low probability to a usually rare event, but have more
systematic roots (Betts 1978; Jervis 2006). If we erred on the other side and reacted every
time, we would be frazzled by false alarms and would possibly bring about the situation
we wish to avoid.
Thus knowing in which “case” we are cannot be simply read off from past events and
their distribution, as risk assessments presuppose clear classification schemes and using
them raises the issue of judgement again at the level of attributing a “case” to a given
type. Whether something should be counted as a “case of ” successful deterrence, or an
inadvertent act by the alleged challenger is not easily decidable, as the debate between
Russett and Lebow and Stein showed (Russett 1984; Lebow and Stein 1990).
Actually, the problem is even more serious. Even with hindsight, we are hardly ever
able to be clear about the actual actions and events which brought about the outcome.
Did the Cold War end because the US “outspent” the Soviet Union on weaponry? Or was
it because the actual sequences of choices made by the US and Soviet leadership finally
meshed so that de-​escalation and a more constructive engagement could be envisaged
by both (Lebow and Risse-​Kappen 1995)? Although we have a considerable amount of
584   Friedrich Kratochwil

evidence, an agreement on “what happened” remains elusive, and seems unlikely to

emerge, even if all remaining secrets were made public. To that extent we cannot simply
rely on risk assessments, because our choices often involve not only risks but genuine
uncertainty; in any event, the law of large numbers usually does not apply in politics,
particularly not in international politics.
This leads to the paradoxical realization that not only is the future shrouded in mys-
tery, but the past remains an “unknown country,” as controversies concerning hindsight
and its “lessons” suggest, The reasons for this paradox are not difficult to fathom: both
future and past are part of our political projects. They are not written from an
Archimedian point outside of praxis, but from within. Thus a particular problem experi-
enced in the present throws light on the past, which thereby gets “searched” (historizein,
“to search”), and linked to a project in the future (which is however a “present-​future”
and not what will actually occur). Thus neither the past, which seems to be settled and
done with, nor the future, which relies on past distributions and likely trends, is actually
“there.” Rather, they both result from a specific selection. The implications for this dia-
lectic of “problems, projects, and time” cannot be explored here further—​save to note, in
the words of a cognitive scientist:

The root of the problem is not just the variety of viewpoints. It is the difficulty that
advocates have in pinning each other down. When partisans disagree over free trade
or arms control, or foreign aid, the disagreements hinge on more than easily ascer-
tained claims about trade deficits, or missile counts, or leaky transfer buckets. The
disputes also hinge on hard to refute counterfactual claims about what would have
happened if we had taken different policy paths and on impossible to refute moral
claims about the types of people we should aspire to be—​all claims that partisans can
use to fortify their positions against falsification. (Tetlock 2006)

One problem is of course that only judgements concerning impossibility or inevitabil-

ity are strictly falsifiable; political predictions are usually couched with various caveats
(“may lead to . . .,” “tends to suggest . . .,” etc.). Besides, we usually do not revise our
beliefs when confronted with counterevidence. Pacifists are not convinced that the fre-
quency of war is evidence for the unviability of their project, while realists or Marxists
are always right “in the end” . . . .
From all this, two disconcerting conclusions and one more hopeful message seem
to follow. The first conclusion is that evaluations of political judgements cannot be
obtained by uncontroversial objective criteria, akin to the notion of “scientific object-
ivity.” But that does not mean, as strong “relativists” often claim, that expertise can only
be evaluated within its own framework, which would only follow if we held that strong
incommensurability obtains between different modes of analysis. Even if various expert
prognostics do rather poorly when compared to the “guesses” of lay persons, or other
heuristic devices, such as tossing coins or employing a chimpanzee throwing darts, that
does not mean that this second disconcerting conclusion should be take at face value.
 Judgement: A Conceptual Sketch   585

Somehow we are, however, aware that accepting this as the final word would lead to
the “despair” Hume warned us about, when exalted expectations raised by “false philos-
ophy” are disappointed. Thus, having fewer expectations and doing the best we can lets
us “go on.” The fact that we never know what the meaning of life is does not entail that
there cannot be meaning in life, even if mistakes and disappointments are inevitable.
This brings me to the more hopeful point. As Tetlock suggests in his recent critical
evaluation of expertise, the crude comparison of human and other heuristics, masks
important differences in cognitive styles among experts. Having identified two different
ways of thinking by utilizing Isiah Berlin’s parable of foxes vs hedgehogs (Berlin 1997).
Tetlock found that in experiments evaluating the heuristics of experts,

foxes consistently edge out the hedgehogs but enjoy their most decisive victories in
the long-​term exercises inside their domains of expertise. Analysis of explanations
for their predictions sheds light on how foxes pulled off this cognitive-​stylistic coup.
The foxes’ self-​critical point counter-​point style of thinking prevented them from
building up the sorts of excessive enthusiasm for their predictions that hedgehogs,
especially well informed ones, displayed for theirs [ . . . ]They [the foxes] recognized
the precariousness of many equilibria and hedged their bets by rarely ruling out any-
thing as “impossible.” (Tetlock 2006: 21)

Thus there might be a place for prudence after all, and for the creative thinker or Hume’s
“true philosopher,” who is rooted in a common world, thinks critically without sub-
mitting to the temptations of a “grand theory,” but does not despair because practical
knowledge—​when subjected to theoretical standards—​usually fails this test. It does not
follow that no standards exist; it is just that the ones we usually apply are more problem-
atic than assumed.

Note
1. Donoghue (McAlister) v. Stevenson [1932] All ER Rep. [1932] AC 562, House of Lords.

References
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Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), 436–​89.
Betts, R. (1978). Analyses, Wars and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable. World
Politics (31)1: 61–​89.
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Bloor, D. (2000). Wittgenstein and the Priority of Practice. In T. Schatzki et al. (eds), The
Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge), 95–​106.
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Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 21–​42.
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Tells us about Right and Wrong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
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Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Lebow, R. N., and J. G. Stein (1990). Deterrence: The Elusive Variable. World Politics 42(3):
336–​96.
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(Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Russett, B. (1984). What Makes Deterrence Work? World Politics 36(4): 496–​526.
Strong, T. (2012). Politics Without Vision (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Tetlock, P. (2006). Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press).
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 ­c hapter 44

Virt u es and Ca pa bi l i t i e s

Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould

Ethical issues constantly arise in international politics, and a well-​developed polit-

ical theory must be able to evaluate agents, actions, and conditions in terms of better or
worse. As in many other fields, the ethical dimension of International Political Theory
(IPT) has been dominated by two general approaches adopted from Moral Philosophy,
which can be broadly categorized as Kantian/​ Deontological or Consequentialist/​
Utilitarian ethics (Chappell 2013). Deontological approaches judge actions in terms of
compliance with rationally derived moral rules, like Kant’s Categorical Imperative or
positive statements of international law. Consequentialist and Utilitarian approaches
instead judge actions by their results, as measured via procedures like Bentham’s Felicific
Calculus. These are not the only moral philosophies that have been utilized in IPT, but
they have been dominant, and disputes between their partisans continue to colour the
field.
Within Moral Philosophy itself, however, the last sixty years have seen a renewal of
interest in virtue. This trend has only slowly begun to be addressed in IPT (Becker 1975;
Frede 2013). Pursuing excellence, rather than following rules or maximizing utility,
becomes the focus of ethical life:

A virtue ethics in the fullest sense must treat aretaic notions [ . . . ] rather than deontic
notions [ . . . ] as primary, and it must put a greater emphasis on the ethical assess-
ment of agents and their inner motives and character traits than it puts on the evalu-
ation of acts and [agents’] choices. (Slote 1992: 89)

This chapter discusses the key elements of Virtue Ethics, as well as the related
Capabilities Approach to human development. Virtue Ethics provides an ethical under-
standing of the good directed toward excellence of character, and the Capabilities
Approach argues for the provision of all materials necessary for individuals to live well
according their own concept of the good.
As Martha Nussbaum makes clear, the Deontology and Utilitarianism to which
early virtue ethicists initially responded were straw men. Kant, for example, had a
588    Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould

demonstrable concern with virtue that was missing from the early virtue ethicists’ cari-
catures. Nussbaum attributes this to the way in which Deontology and Utilitarianism
were taught at the time, and to the dominant emphases of philosophers working within
those traditions, who had neglected the concern with virtue; she agrees that a “correct-
ive was therefore overdue” (Nussbaum 1999: 170). Timothy Chappell lays the blame
more specifically on the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore and those who followed on the
linguistic analysis of moral concepts (Chappell 2013). The turn to virtue was no simple
misunderstanding or over-​reaction, and has continued to develop over time.
The turn to virtue in Moral Philosophy was initially presented as a challenge to
Deontological and Utilitarian ethics; but now it is often used in ways complementary
to them (Crisp 1996; Hurka 2001; 2010). Elizabeth Anscombe drew our attention (back)
toward virtue in her 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.” In it, she held that the moral
vocabulary common to both Deontology and Utilitarianism, in the form of their shared
“law conception of ethics,” which is articulated in terms of obligations (“moral oughts”
and “moral musts”) and prohibitions, no longer made sense in the absence of shared
religious convictions centred upon the picture of “God as a divine lawgiver” (Anscombe
1958: 6). The error Anscombe identified was the presumption that concepts like “moral
obligation” correspond to a “fixed and universal thing that they [ . . . ] mean in every lan-
guage and culture [ . . . ] it is to assume that no substantive question could arise about
how, once understood, such words are involved in motivation” (Chappell 2013: 155).
Although Anscombe did not suggest the creation of a Virtue Ethics, her proposed
change of Ethics’ focus toward questions of action, intention, motivation, and virtue sig-
nalled a shift in the emphasis of moral inquiry.
The initial focus after Virtue Ethics’ “recovery” was on emphasizing its distinctiveness
from Deontology and Utilitarianism, and suggesting ways in which it was a preferable
alternative to them (Foot 1978). Deontology starts from the idea of duty, and all other
moral concepts and values derive from it; Utilitarianism starts from the idea of “the
good in terms of states of affairs,” and derives all other moral concepts and values from
it (Louden 1984; Oakley 1996). In both traditions, questions of virtue and character—​
questions about how we ought to be—​are secondary to questions about what we ought
to do (Annas 1996). In Virtue Ethics, however, the agent, his or her character and judge-
ment are central; moral judgements are in the first instance judgement of agent charac-
ter (Schneewind 1990). Virtue Ethics “construes the ideal moral agent as acting from a
direct desire, without first believing that he or she morally ought to perform that action
or have that desire” (Louden 1984: 228). This entails Anscombe’s concerns with agentic
motive and intention, and particularly with “settled patterns of motive, emotion, and
reasoning that lead us to call someone a person of a certain sort” (Nussbaum 1999: 170;
Das 2015). We may usefully contrast the traditions thus: “[an] ethics of duty holds that
only judgements about right action are basic in morality, and that the virtuousness of
traits is always derivative in some way from the prior rightness of actions [ . . . ] an ethics
of virtue [ . . . ] holds that only judgements about virtue are basic in morality, and that
the rightness of actions is always somehow derivative from the virtuousness of traits”
(Trianosky 1990: 336).
 Virtues and Capabilities    589

Over time, Virtue Ethics shifted to rebutting accusations of inability to provide action
guidance or resolve moral dilemmas (Solomon 1988). It was there that Virtue Ethics
developed accounts of how it might help agents know how to go on without depend-
ence upon a formal decision procedure or “technical manual” rule (Annas 2004). In
addressing the imperatival character of the decision procedures of Deontology and
Utilitarianism, Julia Annas encourages us to ask whether what we want from a moral
theory is to be dictated to. She suggests that it is not, because a purely algorithmic moral
decision procedure “leaves out something important about the making of moral deci-
sions. My moral decisions are mine in that I am responsible for them [ . . . ] They reveal
something about me such that I can be praised or blamed for them in a way that cannot
be shifted to the theory” (Annas 2004: 64–​5).
There is a core set of shared claims broadly defining Virtue Ethics. Foremost among
these is the insistence that the focus of moral evaluation and guidance should not be
primarily discrete acts taken in isolation, nor moral quandaries (hard cases), but should
be instead the character of agents, the “complex that includes the presence or absence of
dispositions to recognize certain situations as ethically problematic [ . . . ] and disposi-
tions to treat certain factors as having special weight in ethical decision [ . . . ] concern
for certain things thought to matter [ . . . ] commitments [that] provide a connecting
thread among different moments of the agent’s life” (Kupperman 1988: 116). Rather than
act evaluations, Virtue Ethics encourages us to engage in “aretaic person-​appraisals”
(Montague 1992: 53).

[T]he following two ideas are central: first, the fundamental moral concepts are vir-
tue concepts, as opposed, above all, to rule concepts; and second, the basic normative
aims of moral agents are aretaically determined [ . . . ] by the requirements of acting
from virtue, as opposed, say, to being dictated by a commitment to following certain
deontic rules. (Audi 1995: 466)

Virtue Ethics has developed modes of action guidance and ways to address moral quan-
daries that derive from its primary emphasis on the character. Its focus when address-
ing act-​questions—​in effect, when engaging Deontology and Utilitarianism on their
own terms—​is on the “qualities of agents”; action guidance is secondary to it and to be
derived from it. Hence “all act-​appraisals are explicable in terms of more basic appraisals
of persons [ . . . ] the moral status of acts depends entirely on whether they would be per-
formed by morally good persons or are manifestations of virtue” (Montague 1992: 54).
Before addressing the prescriptive and evaluative aspects of Virtue Ethics, we must
turn to the content of “virtue” itself. Virtues are “qualities that make a person excellent”;
“They make a human being good qua human being” (Battaly 2010: 3; Swanton 2013). As
Michael Slote notes, “calling a trait of character a virtue is essentially the same, in ordin-
ary English, as calling it admirable” (Slote 1992: 94). That a virtue is beneficial and desir-
able is tautologous. Whom any particular virtue benefits may vary, as some demonstrate
benefits for their bearer, while for other virtues, it is third parties who benefit from the
virtuous actions of the bearer, and in many cases it is both, or it is society more broadly,
590    Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould

that benefits. Come what may, a virtue cannot be detrimental to the bearer, for they are
objectively good (Hurka 2006). Because virtue is objectively and intrinsically good, we
pursue it “for its own sake as a constituent of one’s good” (Trianosky 1990: 339).
Substantively, a virtue is a (relatively) stable and unchanging disposition to act in the
right way(s) for the right reason(s), in the absence of any contrary inclination (Brandt
1988; Baechler 1992). Rosalind Hursthouse elaborates:

[T]‌here is more to the possession of a virtue than being disposed to act in certain
ways; at the very least, one has to act in those way for certain reasons [ . . . ] we think
of such character traits as involving much more than tendencies or dispositions to
act, even for certain reasons [ . . . ] we think of honest people as people who tend
to avoid the dishonest deeds and do the honest ones in certain manner—​readily,
eagerly, scrupulously [ . . . ] We expect a reliability in the actions that reflect their atti-
tude toward honesty, too. (Hursthouse 1999: 11–​12)

Robert Audi, by contrast, is much more liberal, in holding that virtues may be “more or
less deeply rooted,” and “more or less dominating in a person’s behavior” (Audi 2009: 2).
Despite being deep-​seated, a virtue will not necessarily determine every action across
an agent’s life, and deviation from it on any particular occasion does not necessarily
demonstrate the absence or loss of the virtue. Situationist Experimental Psychology
has asserted that “character” qua long-​term bundle of behavioural dispositions does
not exist, and have used this to criticize the conceptual underpinnings of Virtue Ethics
(Doris 1998; Kupperman 2001; 2009; Upton 2009). The Situationist critique misses the
point: “these studies assume a notion of disposition that is defined solely in terms of
frequency of actions, where the actions in question are defined with no reference to the
agent’s reasons for acting. For Virtue Ethics, however, a virtue is a disposition to act for
reasons, and claims about frequency are irrelevant to this, until some plausible connec-
tion is established with the agent’s reasons” (Annas 2006: 519).
The Situationist critique has raised the issue of what it means to act from a virtue;
here, most authors begin with Aristotle’s formulation from Nicomachean Ethics II.IV
(1105a26–​30):

Actions done in accordance with virtues are done in a just or temperate way not
merely by having some quality of their own, but rather if the agent acts in a certain
state, namely, first with knowledge, secondly, from rational [deliberate] choice, and
rational [deliberate] choice of the actions for their own sake, and thirdly, from a firm
and unshakable [unchangeable/​permanent] character.

A virtue is not defined simply by the act manifesting the disposition, but by the motiv-
ations underlying that disposition and act. This means again that to act virtuously, the
agent acts knowingly in a manner characteristic of the relevant virtue, and chooses to act
that way for its own sake; the agent does so in a way “that goes well beyond the bound-
aries of a given intention or even performance [ . . . ] choice-​making requires not one-​
time, isolated efforts, but a sustained chain of actions” (Sherman 1988: 99). For Audi,
 Virtues and Capabilities    591

action from virtue has three requirements: intentionality, deliberateness, and voluntari-
ness; it is “aretaically grounded intentional action” (Audi 1995). For Christine Swanton,
a properly virtuous act—​in addition to being properly motivated—​succeeds in “hitting
the target” of the relevant virtue. An action that misses the mark, no matter how virtu-
ously motivated, is not fully virtuous (Swanton 2001: 2003). “ ‘Virtuous action’ pertains
to what is accomplished [ . . . ] an agent acts from virtue when the source of the action is
the agent’s virtue or good character” (van Zyl 2014: 121)
When staking out their place in the field, the earliest Virtue Ethics figures tended to
be aggressively antinomian, claiming: “determining what one ought to do involves nei-
ther knowing and applying a rule nor specifying a good and predicting which course of
action will most efficiently yield access to it” (Alderman 1982; 149). This antinomian-
ism has not remained a prominent feature of Virtue Ethics; in part, this is because this
early hostility to rules gave rise to the criticism that, without a fully determinate decision
procedure, Virtue Ethics was hobbled as a moral theory by an applicability problem: it
could neither evaluate acts taken by agents nor guide agents in making morally appro-
priate decisions. In addition to pointing out that Deontology and Utilitarianism also fail
by their own terms in this regard, Virtue Ethics has developed multiple approaches to
the issues of action guidance and action evaluation. At its most basic, Virtue Ethics sug-
gests that an act is right if it is virtuous. This leads to an obvious epistemic question, and
it is on that question that most attention is currently focused.
As ways to perform the evaluative and counselling functions, contemporary Virtue
Ethics suggests some rules which, while structurally similar to those of the other
approaches, do not perform quite the same function as Deontological or Utilitarian rules
because the focus of “V-​Rules” is not on whether an act is or was allowable/​forbidden/​
required. V-​Rules point the agent to questions about whether the proposed act would be
in keeping with the type of character they understand themselves aspiring to embody.
Hursthouse’s “Qualified Agent” approach suggests that we ask ourselves whether the
act we are evaluating or contemplating is an act that a fully virtuous agent would charac-
teristically undertake in similar circumstances (Hursthouse 1996; 1999). We might ask
someone whom we believe possesses the relevant virtue, and this may even be requisite
in situations in which we recognize ourselves to be far from having internalized the vir-
tue in question. This encourages us to think “about what is important in one’s current
situation, which virtues are called for, and what acting virtuously involves in this situ-
ation” (van Zyl 2013: 174). Hursthouse suggests that the most fruitful approach might
simply be enumeration: “a virtuous agent is one who is honest, charitable, just, etc. So
what she characteristically does is act honestly, charitably, justly, etc. and not dishon-
estly, uncharitably, unjustly [ . . . ] not only does each virtue generate a prescription [ . . . ]
but each vice a prohibition” (Hursthouse 1996: 25).
There is an ineluctably and admirably aspirational aspect to this. Virtue Ethics is built
upon moral striving, trying to be better than we currently are across an entire range of
ways of being in the world. This places our deliberative focus on the understanding that
“what I should do, in my situation, is what I would do if I were brave (generous, fair,
etc.), where this is taken to mean braver than I [currently] am” (Annas 2006: 523–​4).
592    Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould

An outgrowth of Virtue Ethics’ purported general inability to guide was the more spe-
cific failure in cases of moral dilemmas in which virtues pull in opposing directions.
This too is a problem common to Deontology and Utilitarianism. For Hursthouse, these
dilemmas are sometimes only apparent, the result of an incomplete understanding of
what it means to be V1 or V2 (where they represent particular virtues); but at other times,
Virtue Ethics may provide a distinct advantage over other approaches by encouraging
us to recognize that there are instances we may face in which there simply may be no
right act, and in which tragedy and regret are sometimes inescapable, but that despite
this, acting in such circumstances, and failing to meet the criteria of every relevant vir-
tue, is not the same as acting wrongly. An agent acts wrongly here only when he or she
acts “indifferently or gladly, as the vicious do” (van Zyl 2013: 176). A virtuous agent will
recognize in a dilemma that “whatever they do, they violate a moral requirement, and
we expect them [ . . . ] to register this in some way—​by feeling distress, or remorse, or
guilt” (Hursthouse 1999: 44). In such situations, when no matter how an agent acts, there
will be some virtue’s requirement that is not met (perhaps more than one virtue, and
perhaps spectacularly so), Virtue Ethics can still offer guidance by reminding us that a
virtuous agent would choose only “after much hesitation and consideration of possible
alternatives, [but] feeling much regret, and doing such-​and-​such by way of restitution”
(Hursthouse 1999: 48).
Swanton, conversely, suggests we move away from using the virtuous agent as touch-
stone, and suggests instead focusing on the “target” of a virtue, on whatever it is that a
particular virtue ought to bring about (Swanton 2001; 2003). In articulating her “target-​
centered view,” recall, Swanton suggests that an act is virtuous (in respect of any particu-
lar virtue) if it hits the target of that virtue, i.e. a generous act is one that hits the target
of generosity. Swanton does acknowledge potential complications to a simple, exter-
nal, one-​target-​per-​virtue understanding. Formulating Virtue Ethics’ evaluation and
guidance along these lines leads her to differ sharply from Hursthouse regarding tragic
dilemmas; For Hursthouse, sometimes there is no right action to be taken, but Swanton
holds that by focusing on the target of the relevant virtue, a right action might still be
found. “For a virtue-​based act evaluation allows us to think of ‘actions’ as embracing
demeanor, motivation, processes of deliberation and thought, reactions, and attitudes.
In short, the choice of a repugnant action can be understood as right (overall virtuous)
when we take account of the full nature of the action” (Swanton 2001: 51).
It would be difficult for proponents to claim theoretical superiority as the basis for
injecting Virtue Ethics into IPT. Virtue may be a more human, more realistic, and more
complete approach than Deontological or Utilitarian ethics; it may be less abstract and
rule-​obsessed. However, there is no normative reason to prefer it on those grounds,
or at least there is no authority to validate such a choice. If one chooses to pursue the
good through reasoned action grounded in character, fine—​but one might just as well
pursue it through careful observation of positive rules, or a calculation of utility. Any
transcendent claim of superiority by Virtue Ethics proponents would be difficult to
defend. It would also run foul of Aristotle’s view, which eschewed Platonic idealism and
the notion that “the good” could be specified as a single universal thing (Nicomachean
 Virtues and Capabilities    593

Ethics, I.VI–​VII, 1096a10–​1098b10). Even if such a transcendent good existed, he says, it

“is not the sort of good a human being can achieve in action or possess,” and so not the
proper concern of political ethics (1096b30–​35; see Chapter 43).
Alternatively, Virtue Ethics proponents could intervene in IPT by claiming to address
practical shortcomings of Deontological or Utilitarian approaches. The most promis-
ing of these, mentioned above, is the apparently greater ability of Virtue Ethics to han-
dle the sort of moral ambiguity that can confound the more rule-​focused approaches.
Character and virtue can endure even where all the available choices are bad. In such
situations, rules can reach a deadlock, and utility calculations can lead to monstrous
outcomes. Indeed, a consistently virtuous character is an appealingly stable foundation
for action in complex moral situations, and is perhaps part of the impetus for turning
back toward virtue in the first place.
Note, however, that a similar accommodation could be made within both Utilitarian
and (especially) Deontological approaches. The level of reductiveness is more a matter
of the moral theorist’s dispositions and approach. For example, in his book on contem-
porary torture ethics, Matthew H. Kramer puts considerable effort into theorizing a way
forward for moral reasoning when positive rules clash (2014: 1). For some Utilitarians
and Deontologists, reductive moral theory has the desirable qualities of parsimony and
clarity, but this need not be the case.
Virtue Ethics offers a shift in emphasis, and perhaps a more workable grasp of com-
plex problems. To make a clear case for Virtue Ethics will require a more thorough
account of how the content of virtues can be distinguished. More importantly, some jus-
tification for Virtue Ethics’ greater applicability must be made. The related Capabilities
Approach shows how one might justify an alternative normative theory in relation to a
specific moral problem.
The Capabilities Approach is not a form of ethical reasoning in the same sense as
Virtue Ethics. Instead of defining ethical choices or characteristics, the Capabilities
Approach provides the content for a particular kind of normative Political Theory. It
emerged as a specific critique of the neoliberal international development policies and
Rawlsian political theory that dominated much of the 1980s and 1990s. The Capabilities
Approach thus directs its normative force at states of affairs in political communities—​
judging the relative justice of past or present arrangements, and prescribing more just
arrangements in the future. Advocates reinterpret for a modern context Aristotle’s view
in Politics that a political community “comes together for the sake of living, but [ . . . ]
remains together for the sake of living well” (I.II.1252b25–​30).
This understanding of ethics is something the Capabilities Approach shares with
Virtue Ethics: a good community is one that best allows its members to fulfil their
purposes. Such a community allows people to live and act virtuously. Whereas Virtue
Ethics pursues the idea of living well through focusing on virtuous action and charac-
ter, the Capabilities Approach looks instead to the conditions that allow the realization
of such good living. Amartya Sen, the leading figure in developing and articulating the
Capabilities Approach, grounds capabilities in the concept of “functionings,” which are
“various things a person may value doing or being” (1999: 75). Each person has some
594    Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould

capability, or “combinations of functionings that are feasible to achieve.” Whereas Virtue

Ethics evaluates action, motivation, and character, the Capabilities Approach is expli-
citly interested in the freedom to act. It is directed to the judging of states of affairs that
give people (or do not give them) desirable combinations of capabilities for action.
The Capabilities Approach emerged amid widespread criticism of international
development policy and the liberal political theory that provided its normative dimen-
sion. Most pointedly, it countered development policies focusing narrowly on national
measures of economic growth. In Development as Freedom, Sen argues:

Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means

to expanding freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms also
depend on other determinants [ . . . ] Viewing development in terms of expanding
substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development import-
ant, rather than some of the means that inter alia, play a prominent part in the pro-
cess. (1999: 3)

By promoting freedom as the goal of development, and correspondingly demoting nar-

rowly economic measures, Sen broke sharply from the dominant development theor-
ies and policies of the time. Whereas other critics of global neoliberalism like Joseph
Stiglitz and Naomi Klein focused on institutional arrangements and the abuse of power
imbalances, the Capabilities Approach was distinguished by its focus on human ends.
Sen placed moral weight on substantive freedoms as ends in themselves, much like
Aristotle’s “end we wish for because of itself, and because of which we wish for the other
things.” (Nicomachean Ethics I.II, 1049a15–​20) Such substantive freedoms give people
the capability to realize the outcomes they value. For Sen, the capabilities were also
multidimensional, and it was the combination that mattered.
The capabilities approach is thus a hybrid of Aristotelian ethical structure, liberal
individualism, and modern economics. The purpose (or telos) of a good regime for
Aristotle was to facilitate the expression of a culturally embedded package of virtues,
which facilitated “living well” or flourishing together. For Sen, regimes are judged by
the capabilities their citizens have for free action that realizes the lived experiences they
value. This also undermines the claim sometimes advanced that “certain political or
social freedoms, such as liberty of participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive
basic education” might be at odds with development (Sen 1999: 5). Instead, capabilities,
like virtues, are ends in themselves, as well as “constituent components of development
[. . . their] relevance for development does not need to be freshly established through
their indirect contribution to GNP or the growth of industrialization.” The Capabilities
Approach also argues against the related view that human concerns should be attended
to only after sufficient economic growth has been achieved (Sen 1999: 41).
The Capabilities Approach pairs an ancient teleological outlook with the liberal indi-
vidual freedom to determine one’s own valued outcomes. Substantive freedoms are also
operationalized, measured, and subject to causal analysis in the mode of modern eco-
nomics, giving the Capabilities Approach empirical bite and disciplinary credibility—​at
 Virtues and Capabilities    595

least within international development. To support his claims about the importance of
freedom as an end, therefore, Sen uses economic analysis to show the close “empirical
linkages” between freedom as an end and the sort of instrumental freedoms that facili-
tate development (Sen 1999: 38).
In tandem with his applied critiques of international development metrics, policies,
and theory, Sen was also advancing a theoretical critique against the dominant nor-
mative political theory of the same era: the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls. This
conversation has had a long arc, with Rawls releasing A Theory of Justice in 1971 and
a heavily revised version in 1999. The Capability Approach is a major component of
Sen’s response, which culminated in The Idea of Justice (2011). Despite its dominance,
Rawls’s work elicited widespread criticism. Raymond Geuss offers a more generalized
lament: “as Rawls’ purportedly egalitarian theory became more entrenched and more
highly elaborated, social inequalities in fact increased in virtually all industrialized soci-
eties” (2003). The distance between Rawls’s theory of justice and the unequal and unjust
facts of life in the real world poses a dilemma similar to that of development theories
based on narrow economic measures: in both cases, the pursuit of an ideal—​either just-
ice or economic development—​led to adverse outcomes in the lived experience of many
people.
Responding to the same dissonance between theory and reality that unsettles Geuss,
Sen abandons the “transcendental” understanding of justice that runs through Rawls’s
theory. It is not “feasible” (see Chapter 48) to reason toward a perfect concept of justice,
because ultimately Rawls’s procedure cannot rule out alternative conceptions of justice
(Sen 2011). Sen takes a practical view of justice as choosing between alternatives in real
situations, echoing Aristotle’s advice in Nicomachean Ethics I.II to “[seek] exactness in
each area to the extent that the nature of the subject allows” (1049b20–​25) and his rejec-
tion of Platonic idealism because “the good cannot be some common and single univer-
sal” (I.VI.1096a.25–​30). For Sen, the existence of a perfect account of justice is irrelevant,
when gross injustice can be easily identified and—​perhaps less easily—​overcome.
“What is needed,” instead of a perfect theory of justice, is “an agreement, based on public
reasoning, on rankings of alternatives that can be realized” (Sen 2011: 17).
Sen also shifts the focus of his analysis from the institutional arrangements that
preoccupied Rawls to the “realized actuality” of those arrangements that “goes well
beyond the organizational picture, and includes the lives that people manage—​or do
not manage—​to live” (2011: 18). This is where the Capabilities Approach makes its dis-
tinctive contribution by providing the normative content. Otherwise, it is conceivable
that another type of non-​transcendental normative theory could be developed that
aspired to “better” institutions rather than perfect ones, but without achieving the kind
of radical normative departure offered by the human-​centred Capabilities Approach.
Sen instead emphasizes “comprehensive outcomes” that evaluate the entire path from
opportunity, through action, to result.
Instead of judging whether people have contracted to a fair and just set of institutions,
Sen wants to know if they have such things as “political freedoms,” “economic facilities,”
“social opportunities,” “transparency guarantees,” and “protective security” (1999: 10)
596    Steven Torrente and Harry D. Gould

This is why the Capabilities Approach appears to respond well to concerns, like Geuss’s,
about Rawls’s theory. The root of Geuss’s concern seems to be that the question Rawls
asks, “What is the correct conception of justice?” does not engage in a satisfying way
with the real challenges people are experiencing (Geuss 2003). The move from abstrac-
tion to lived experience gives the Capabilities Approach powerful tools to articulate
stubborn injustices and inequalities. Regarding the unequal treatment of women, for
example, Nussbaum (2002) argues that the Capabilities Approach gives normative rec-
ognition to dimensions of women’s lives that other normative political theories do not.
Where the Capabilities Approach has been most influential, however, has been in inter-
national development.
In her assessment, Sakiko Fukuda-​Parr finds that it has been highly successful as nor-
mative theory, but has not changed international development policy. Fukuda-​Parr’s
historical analysis of development theory positions the Capabilities Approach (together
with “human development” approaches as “HDCA”) as one of two major normative
challenges to the economically oriented development agenda that dominated the 1980s
and 1990s. Sen and the Capabilities Approach helped to discredit the “Washington
Consensus” of liberalization and free-​market policies and create a new consensus
that was eventually codified in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals
(Fukuda-​Parr 2011).
This would seem to be a great success, for which the Capabilities Approach can take
significant credit. According to Fukuda-​Parr, not only has the human-​centred outlook
successfully diffused as an international norm, it has been embedded in the main goals
of major international organizations and donors. But lived experience and development
policy have been more stubborn:

While the normative framework of the international development agenda has been
redefined by drawing on the HDCA, it is far from evident that the implementation
strategies have undergone the same shift. National and international development
policies continue to give priority to objectives of macroeconomic stability and eco-
nomic growth, justified by the theory that growth is not only a necessary but also a
sufficient condition for reducing poverty. (Fukuda-​Parr 2011: 128)

In other words, despite an enormous shift in the normative foundations of international

development theory, the structure and content of development policies have not
changed. Once abstracted from their normative foundations, even the MDGs become
just a complex replacement for GDP growth targets (Fukuda-​Parr 2011: 130). She con-
cludes that since 2000, international development has changed its “instruments and
narratives” but not its “content” (p. 129).
It would be unfair to blame the Capabilities Approach and its advocates alone for the
mixed results. Fukuda-​Parr (2011: 131) notes that conditions in the 1990s were favourable
for the Capabilities Approach, but now “heterodox human-​centered perspectives are no
longer of instrumental value to governments of the South for legitimating their posi-
tions to domestic and external audiences.” It is also possible that there is some tension
 Virtues and Capabilities    597

between the Aristotelian structure of the Capabilities Approach and its modern eco-
nomic tools and expression, since these traditions make fundamentally different “philo-
sophical wagers” about how to produce relevant knowledge (Jackson 2011: ch. 2).

Conclusion

The partial success of the Capabilities Approach shows that these alternative norma-
tive ideas can be integrated with international political theories. While Fukuda-​Parr’s
criticism of implementation should be noted, Sen and other Capabilities theorists have
prompted a re-​evaluation of the normative foundations of thought in international
development.
There is at least a pragmatic justification for turning to these resources—​or a practical
one, to use a more Aristotelian term. Virtue Ethics and the Capabilities Approach can
each do things that other normative traditions do not. Virtue Ethics, for example, can
draw normative resources from character in situations where formal rules have been
rendered ineffective. Capabilities scholars have shown that they can make certain prob-
lems intelligible that are hard to recognize in terms of utility or principles. To the degree
that those ends are desirable to the theorist, the incorporation of virtue or capabilities
into IPT can be justified on that basis.
Whether Virtue Ethics and the Capabilities Approach are more justified than
Deontological or Utilitarian approaches is another question. IPT uses a plurality of nor-
mative resources—​including the many strains of Deontological and Utilitarian ethics—​
without regard to an ultimate justification for any particular approach. It should not be
a problem to make use of virtue or capability in IPT, or even to justify that use. To justify
their use in comparison to Utility or Deontology, however, raises questions of consider-
able scope and difficulty. No widely accepted authority currently exists that could valid-
ate the foundations of any normative tradition over or against the others. The position of
VE/​CA with respect to this dilemma, however, is no different than that of the other tra-
ditions. As long as one is willing to apply the same standards of use, virtue and capability
should be considered valid components of IPT’s normative tool chest.

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 ­c hapter 45

Emotion s a nd
Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Renée Jeffery

International Relations is experiencing an “emotional turn” (Bleiker and Hutchison

2014). Where once the emotions were routinely conceived as “epiphenomenal” to world
politics, “a source of irrationality,” or perhaps as a tool used by “savvy strategic act-
ors” to manipulate target audiences (Mercer 2006: 290), increasing numbers of schol-
ars now accept that the emotions are a pervasive feature, both of human nature and
of the relationships that define and mark international relations. The result has been
the emergence of a burgeoning literature that has added consideration of the emo-
tions to particular issue areas, including geopolitics (Moisi 2009), decision-​making in
war (Rosen 2005), protest movements (Ross 2010), financial crises (Widmaier 2010;
Gammon 2008), peace-​building (Long and Brecke 2003; Tang 2011), and post-​conflict
justice (Jeffery 2014a; Elster 2004).
Accompanying the empirical study of the emotions in international relations is a
smaller but more focused literature which has begun to reconsider existing theories
of international relations in light of the emotions (Crawford 2000; Mercer 2008), to
reframe the history of international political thought in ways that include rather than
exclude the emotions (Jeffery 2011; Bleiker and Hutchison 2008: 17) and to develop new,
sentimental or affect-​based theories of world politics (Mercer 2014; Crawford 2014;
Jeffery 2014b). Rather than being an afterthought designed to provide either ballast or
solid theoretical foundations for the empirical study of the emotions in international
relations, however, the emotional turn was, in its earliest incarnation, a predominantly
theoretical enterprise driven by dissatisfaction with existing rationalist, reason-​cen-
tred theories of world politics. Crawford, in particular, notes that while the “assump-
tion of rationality is ubiquitous in international relations theory” and brings with it an
implicit rejection of the emotions, the “passions,” as she terms them, remain under-​or
untheorized in International Relations (2000: 116). This is despite the fact that, for all
 Emotions in IPT   601

the emphasis on rationality in most dominant realist and liberal theories, emotions like
fear are embedded in them (Crawford 2000: 117). As a result, she and others have noted
that conventional theories of international relations tend to rely on one-​dimensional
accounts of the emotions as the dichotomous opponents of rationality to be avoided in
the reason-​centred study and practice of international politics.
Where International Political Theory (IPT) is concerned, the centrality of reason and
rationality, and the consequent rejection of the emotions, has been writ large. With few
exceptions, most prominent accounts of international ethics have relied on and pro-
moted the assumed cognitive and deliberative superiority of rationality over the emo-
tions (see Chapter 33). For rationalist cosmopolitans, to be rational is to use reason to
determine moral rules that all other rational beings can similarly derive and agree to.
Rationality is thus conceived as a cognitive function that allows us to meet the core
requirement of a cosmopolitan ethic, impartiality (Cottingham 1983: 83; Singer 2011: 100;
O’Neill 2013: 222; 1998: 104). Impartiality, in turn, is the guiding principle that ensures
that despite their individualism, cosmopolitan ethics are both universal and egalitarian.
For rationalist cosmopolitans, an explicit rejection of the emotions as a source of
moral judgements is a logical corollary of the demand for impartiality. For example,
Peter Singer argues that an ethic based on rational moral truths is preferable to an emo-
tionally driven ethic because it allows us to consider our reasons in light of “the reasons
for action that all rational beings would have, even rational sentient beings who had
evolved in circumstances very different from our own” (2011: 204). That is, rationality
allows us to ensure that the judgements we make are truly universal. By contrast, an
emotional view of ethical deliberation is based on the notion that ethics is “all a matter of
what we want, or desire [ . . . ] or what feels good or bad to us, of what we find attractive
or repugnant” (p. 204). This, Singer contends, is neither universal nor egalitarian, and
thus cannot be considered a cosmopolitan ethic or, indeed, an ethic at all.
Dominant variants of rationalist cosmopolitanism thus base their endorsement of
reason and rejection of the emotions on a set of assumptions about the nature of reason
and the nature of the emotions. While reason contributes to impartiality, emotions are
conceived as being fundamentally unreliable, partial, selfish, and dangerous, and thus
as having no legitimate place in processes of ethical deliberation. Owing much of their
heritage to Immanuel Kant’s claim that regardless of how benevolent their intent may
be, the emotions can never provide the proper basis for making moral judgements or
performing our ethical duties (Kant 1948: 11–​12; Frazer 2012: 124–​5), when rationalist
cosmopolitan theories of ethics consider the emotions, it is almost always in the con-
text of devising strategies to ensure the dominance of reason in the face of emotional
onslaughts. Rejecting David Hume’s suggestion that reason and emotion are “uncom-
pounded and inseparable” and with it his famous dictum that “[r]‌eason is, and ought
only to be the slave of the passions” (2000: 316, 312), contemporary rationalist cosmo-
politans (even those who do not identify as Kantians) have thus tended to follow Kant’s
assumption not only that the emotions are separable from reason (O’Neill 2013: 222;
1998: 104; Wolff, in McCarty 1993: 424), but that they are “the enemy of reason and mor-
ality” (Pettys 2007: 1609).
602   Renée Jeffery

Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, recent developments in the fields of neuroscience

and psychology have sorely tested these foundational assumptions about the nature of
the emotions and its relationship to reason, on which rationalist cosmopolitan theories
are based. Embraced by scholars of IPT, these empirical findings have profound impli-
cations for existing theoretical accounts of international ethics. That is, where the emo-
tions are concerned, a particularly close relationship has been forged between empirical
research and IPT. Among the most prominent contemporary theorists of the emo-
tions, a rudimentary understanding of the neurosciences and psychology has become
commonplace, while several key scholars have gained considerable expertise in these
fields (Crawford 2000; Mercer 2006). Though unusual in contemporary IPT, in histor-
ical terms this new interdisciplinary coupling of theory and empirics is neither radical
nor novel. Until the early twentieth century, scholars concerned with the emotions did
not, by and large, recognize what later became customary disciplinary distinctions,
and commonly combined elements of psychology and philosophy in a single approach
(Solomon 2003: 55).
Among the most important developments in psychology and the neurosciences
in recent years, one set of discoveries has had by far the most significant impact on
IPT: studies of patients with lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) of
the brain. Of these, the most famous cases include the historical case of Phineas Gage,
a railway worker who suffered a horrific brain injury in 1848 when an explosion blew a
three-​foot-​long tamping rod through his head (Damasio et al. 1994: 1102) and the more
recent case of Elliot, a brain tumour patient who, in the course of having his tumour
removed, sustained damage to his prefrontal cortex (Damasio 2005: 34–​51). In both
these cases, the patient experienced significant cognitive and behavioural deficits. Both
underwent dramatic personality changes, lost the ability to respond emotionally to
certain stimuli or to present appropriate emotional responses to others, and displayed
severely compromised rational decision-​making skills (Damasio et al. 1994: 1104).
Together, these and other similar cases indicated not only that damage to the VMPFC
was associated with impaired emotional processing but that this, in turn, limits these
patients’ abilities to reason and make decisions.
On the basis of his groundbreaking study of Elliot, Antonio Damasio theorized that
“[c]‌ertain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensible for rational-
ity” (2005: 53). Emotion, he argued, is “in the loop of reason, and [ . . . ] could assist the
reasoning process rather than necessarily disturb it, as was commonly assumed” (pp.
x–​xi). In doing so, he did not suggest that “emotion was a substitute for reasoning” or
“set emotion against reason,” but rather argued that emotion ought to be seen “as at least
assisting reason and at best holding a dialogue with it” (pp. xi, xiii). That is, Damasio
argued that Hume was right: reason and the emotions are not separable, nor are the
emotions necessarily detrimental to reason. On the contrary, without emotion we sim-
ply cannot reason.
For scholars of the emotions in international relations theory, these findings have
profound implications. Not only do they challenge the assumed dominance of ration-
ality in standard accounts of human nature that underpin most conventional theories
 Emotions in IPT   603

of international relations, but they suggest that the continued rejection of the emotions
cannot be justified. On this basis Jonathan Mercer has drawn directly on Damasio’s work
to reconsider and reconfigure the notion of the “first image” to incorporate the idea that
the emotions are “a necessary aspect of rationality” (2006: 290).
For IPT, however, a further set of discoveries, which have sought to extend Damasio’s
original findings to subjects with intact brains, are especially significant. With the
advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), identifying those regions of
the brain responsible for particular functions no longer relies on correlating instances of
brain damage with particular types of functional impairment. Of particular relevance
to IPT, fMRI technology allows us to identify the particular regions and structures of
the brain activated when we make moral judgements. Among its range of applications,
neurophilosophers have used this technology in their attempts to determine whether
emotions are associated, “in a systematic way with specific moral responses under spe-
cific moral conditions” (Young and Koenigs 2007: 72)—​that is, to determine whether
the emotions play a consistent role or set of roles in making moral judgements.
In their initial study, Joshua Greene and his colleagues (2001) traced neural activity
in subjects presented with the classic “footbridge” and “trolley” dilemmas (Foot 1967;
Thomson 1976). The pairing of these two dilemmas was designed to allow a compara-
tive examination of the relationship between emotional responses and particular types
of moral judgements. In both dilemmas the subject is asked whether they will save five
lives at the expense of one: in the trolley dilemma they are asked whether they will divert
an out-​of-​control trolley heading toward five people onto another track where only one
person will be killed; in the footbridge dilemma, they are asked whether they would
push a very fat man off a footbridge to stop the same trolley from killing the five. In
the trolley dilemma, the death of one could be considered an unfortunate, foreseen, but
unintended consequence of a good action, namely saving five lives, whereas in the foot-
bridge case, the subject must choose whether or not to intentionally kill the fat man to
save the others (Greene and Haidt 2002: 519). In standard assessments of these dilem-
mas, the majority of subjects respond that they would divert the trolley but that they
would not kill the fat man to save the others (Cushman, Young, and Hauser 2006). That
is, people tend to be more comfortable with a consequentialist justification for their
actions than a deontological one, even though the material outcomes of their actions
will be identical.
In their original study, Greene at al. (2001) used fMRI technology to determine which
parts of the brain were activated when subjects were asked to make judgements about
each of these dilemmas. In doing so, they demonstrated that there is a strong correlation
between neural activity associated with the emotions and making moral judgements.
They also demonstrated that emotional responses, such as those typically provoked by
thought of killing the fat man, “have an influence on and are not merely incidental to
moral judgements” (Greene, Sommerville, and Nystrom 2001). That is, they confirmed
Damasio’s suggestion that emotion is “in the loop of reason” (2005: x).
Greene’s conclusions went even further than this. By pairing the trolley and foot-
bridge dilemmas in another fMRI study he was able to compare differences in neural
604   Renée Jeffery

activity associated with consequentialist and deontological judgements. In doing so,

he found that “deontological patterns of moral judgement are driven by emotional
responses while consequentialist judgements are driven by ‘cognitive’ processes” which
also include the emotions (Greene 2008: 59). That is, although deontological moral
reasoning is strongly associated with reason and rationality in theoretical terms, in psy-
chological and neurological terms deontological decisions tend to be immediate, emo-
tionally charged responses, rather than the results of considered rational deliberation.
To view deontological cosmopolitan reasoning as “purely rationalist,” Greene argues, is
thus “a kind of moral confabulation” (p. 63) that does not accurately reflect what actually
happens when we make that type of judgement.
Of course, demonstrating that the emotions are an essential part of moral reason-
ing and ethical action, and arguing that they ought to be are two very different things.
After all, IPT is not primarily concerned with explaining how human beings behave in
their international relations with one another but how they ought to behave. Suggesting
that empirical findings from the neurosciences might have direct bearing on cosmo-
politan moral reasoning thus invites the inevitable objection that an “ought” cannot be
derived from an “is.” In his Treatise on Human Nature, Hume famously noted that “[i]‌n
every system of morality,” propositions of “is” and “is not” become transformed without
explanation into statements of “ought” and “ought not” (1998: 3.1.1.27). In doing so, he
argued that it is “altogether inconceivable” that an “ought” relationship could be dir-
ectly deduced from an “is” statement. Although the point Hume was making here was
that a distinction between “is” and “ought” would allow us to move away from “vul-
gar systems of morality” based on the equally vulgar behaviour of human beings, most
interpretations of this statement contend that Hume was “asserting here that no set of
nonmoral premises can entail a moral conclusion” (MacIntyre 1959: 452). Such has been
the abiding strength of this (inaccurate) interpretation that Hume’s supposed ban on
deriving an “ought” from an “is” has become “a piece of philosophical dogma” to which
many philosophers and social scientists subscribe with almost evangelical zeal (Joyce
2008: 371–​2).
Often accompanying the “is/​ought” argument is what G. E. Moore (1949 [1903])
termed the “naturalistic fallacy,” a problem derived from the assumption that what
is natural is good and thus right. For Moore, this assumption is erroneous because it
rests on a definition of something that cannot be defined, the concept of “good” (Joyce
2007: 146–​7). For proponents of naturalistic ethics, however, the indeterminate nature
of “good” is not a problem. For them, scientific facts and moral prescriptions exist in a
continuous relationship. For naturalized ethicists, theories of right and wrong ought to
“match” empirical evidence about “natural human practice” (Greene 2003: 847). This
does not mean that “all facts are normative facts, nor that all existing states of affairs
[ . . . ] are good” but that “norms are natural, and that they arise from and are justified by
purely natural processes” (Casebeer 2003: 843).
Of course, a significant objection to this approach is the claim that human inter-
actions are not shaped by “materialist forces” or “given by nature” but are constructed
by “shared ideas” (Wendt 1999: 1). On the face of it, this objection poses a significant
 Emotions in IPT   605

problem for the relationship between the empirical findings of the neurosciences and
IPT. Neuroscience is a predominantly materialist field of endeavour (Gazzaniga in
Snead 2007: 1278), which ascribes to the notion that “ultimate reality is purely material”
(Wendt 2006: 183). Despite a recent softening of this position in the subfields of neuro-
philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, most neuroscientists remain firm in the view
that “human thought and behavior are caused solely by physical processes taking place
inside the brain” (Snead 2007: 1277–​8). This reductionist materialist position thus main-
tains that ideas cannot be “ontologically autonomous” (Wendt 2006: 183) but are instead
nothing more than conscious derivatives of unconscious neural activities. Reductive
materialism and naturalist ethics thus go hand in hand: if our existence is purely con-
stituted by the material forces of nature, then the straightforward transposition of sci-
entific facts into philosophical or social scientific ideas is unproblematic (Jeffery 2014c).
Yet human beings are not simply physical bodies and neuro-​chemical brains, nor is it
the case that ideas can be “reduced to material conditions” or to fundamental features of
human nature (Wendt 2006: 183). Even if we could establish a direct causal link between
particular neurological events and the ideas that accompany them, no amount of sci-
entific testing could tell us what those ideas mean or explain their social significance.
Rather, non-​material aspects of human nature, from our experience of consciousness
to the generation of ideas and the meanings we attribute to them, differentiate human
beings from “ordinary physical objects” (Wendt 2006: 185; Bevir and Kedar 2008: 505).
Studying human interactions in purely material terms, and reducing human relation-
ships to sets of neurological, biochemical, and physiological processes, thus overlooks
key non-​material aspects of human nature.
Together, these arguments seem to suggest that the empirical findings of the natural
sciences cannot have a legitimate influence on IPT. Indeed, if international ethics is fun-
damentally concerned with generating ideas about how human beings ought to behave
in their interactions with one another, then it would seem logical to conclude that the
materialism of the neurosciences has little to say to the non-​materialist world of ideas.
Yet, arguing that empirical findings from the natural sciences may have a bearing on
theories of ethics does not require us to go as far as naturalized ethicists do. On the con-
trary, understanding the “underlying psychological processes that generate people’s
[moral judgements]” can help us to determine whether those judgements are justified
or not (Knobe and Nichols 2008: 8). Using neurological experiments, we can test some
of the underlying assumptions and concepts about the nature of reason and the nature
of emotions that underpin key theories of ethics (Prinz 2008: 194–​5). Empirical studies
can also provide insights into how people understand moral concepts and the processes
involved in making moral judgements that are inaccessible by analytical reflection alone
(Knobe and Nichols 2008: 6). Finally, where “ought” is conceived as implying “can,”
then “ought” may be constrained by, if not derived from, “is.” That is, notwithstand-
ing the sense that ethics demands that we strive toward a set of possibly elusive ide-
als, an “ought” can in fact be derived from an “is” in cases “where it can be empirically
shown that there are certain things we are not obligated to do, because we can’t do them”
(Prinz 2008: 196). Where cosmopolitan ethics (see Chapter 3) are concerned, this might
606   Renée Jeffery

include the demand that we rid our moral judgements of all emotional content: that, as
demonstrated above, is simply impossible. It might also force us to accept that because
the emotions play an essential role in motivating ethical actions, attempting to eradicate
them from processes of ethical deliberation is counterproductive.
Beyond the mere making of moral judgements, however, several recent studies have
also demonstrated that the emotions are implicated in our ability to act on the basis
of those judgements. If ethics is a fundamentally practical exercise, which accepts that
“[m]‌orality requires action of some sorts” (O’Neill 2001: 131), then it stands to reason
that IPT must also consider the factors that motivate ethical behaviour. Rationalist
cosmopolitans commonly accept this premise. For them, reason is, in and of itself, a
motivation to act (Kant 1948: 66; Smith 1994: 66–​7). For scholars of the emotions, how-
ever, the relationship between the emotions and the motivation to act has been generally
accepted for some time. In particular, classic and more recent studies of psychopaths
have provided key insights into the specific relationship between the emotions and
the motivation to act ethically. In his landmark study, Harvey Cleckly (1976 [1941])
argued, that contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that psychopaths lack under-
standing of the harm they cause; psychopaths “understand the harmful consequences
of their actions for others [. . . but] simply do not care about those consequences” (Haidt
2001: 824). In his attempt to explain their psychopathic behaviour, Cleckly found that a
lack of emotion was a key causal feature of psychopathic behaviour (1976: 371).
Since then, Robert Hare (1980; 1991; 1996) and others have confirmed and developed
Cleckly’s findings. In a series of experiments spanning more than two decades, James
Blair and his colleagues found that underlying psychopaths’ destructive actions is an
inability to distinguish moral transgressions, “defined by their consequences for the
rights and welfare of others” from conventional transgressions, or non-​moral breaches
of social expectations or order (1995: 17). This lack of capacity Blair attributed to psycho-
paths’ emotional deficits—​observations that accord well with the sorts of neurological
deficiencies and structural abnormalities observed in the brains of psychopaths (Blair
2003: 5–​7; Kiehl et al. 2001).
Yet the main problem with psychopaths is not their capacity to make moral judge-
ments but rather the behaviour that follows. As Kent Kiehl notes, “Psychopaths are
not impaired in their ability to reason about what is right and wrong” (in Borg 2008:
159). Rather, where they are impaired is “in their ability to do or follow through with
what they reason to be right or wrong” (p. 159). That is, their ability to perform eth-
ical actions on the basis of moral judgements is significantly impaired, leading to
the sort of violent and callous behaviour for which psychopaths are best known.
However the problem with psychopathic behaviour does not simply concern an
inability to perform good actions on the basis of moral judgements about accept-
able behaviour, but more often concerns an inability to avoid actions deemed bad or
unethical by processes of moral deliberation. As Jonathan Haidt argues, this too
can be attributed to the emotional deficiencies suffered by most psychopaths. It is
thus in the absence of major affective reactions that would ordinarily “be triggered
by the suffering of others (remorse, sympathy), condemnation by others (shame,
 Emotions in IPT   607

embarrassment), or attachment to others (love, grief)” that psychopaths lack the motiv-
ation to restrain immoral behaviour (Haidt 2001: 824).
Contrary to the rationalist assumption that reason is a sufficient motivation for action,
and the suggestion that cognitive and behavioural abnormalities in psychopaths can be
attributed to impaired rational thought, studies of psychopaths provide clear evidence
that emotions play an indispensable role in making moral judgements and motivating
ethical actions. As McGeer notes, “work on psychopaths seems to support the view that
the capacity for moral thought and action is strongly dependent on our affective natures
and in particular the capacity to respond empathetically to others’ affective states, to
experience a vicarious emotional response to how they affectively experience the world,
and especially to feel some distress at their distress and suffering” (2008: 231). This, as
McGeer argues, “seems to speak to a Humean rather than a Kantian view of the roots of
moral understanding and moral motivation” (p. 231).
Drawing on the empirical findings of the brain sciences, it is clear that cosmopolitan
theories of ethics must take account of the emotions. Emotions are not only an essential
component of rational decision-​making; they motivate us to act on the basis of the eth-
ical judgements we make. Empirical evidence about the emotions thus has the potential
to transform cosmopolitan ethics in two ways. First, it challenges rational cosmopolitan
thought’s rejection of the emotions. As experiments in the neurosciences have demon-
strated, the emotions are implicated in even our most self-​consciously rational judge-
ments. At the very least this demands that rational cosmopolitans acknowledge that the
emotions are inescapable, even within the most stringent, rigorous processes of rational
thought. This, of course, is a minimalist response with minimal consequences: it says
even what is rational is emotional but does not fundamentally change how rational
cosmopolitan judgements are derived, made, or analysed.
In maximalist terms, however, empirical evidence about the nature of the emotions
and their relationship to reason has the potential to bring about a contemporary revival
of sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethics. A practical sentimentalist ethic maintains that
we have obligations to all other human beings, based not on a purely rational assessment
of their rights, ends, or the utility of our possible actions but on our emotional responses
to witnessing their plight. It suggests that when we witness the suffering of others, or
imagine the harm that a particular course of action might bring, the judgement that says
“This is wrong” is derived not from a rational understanding of universal moral prin-
ciples, but from a visceral human response. For example, when we witness the unjust
infliction of serious harm, we feel angry. It is a response that expresses, both inwardly
and outwardly, that we judge the situation to be morally wrong. That is, our anger is a
moral judgement. This emotional judgement in turn motivates us to act in response,
to help rectify the wrong, and as a result overcome our unpleasant, unsettling negative
emotions.
Of course, our emotions have the potential to be self-​serving, to promote judgements
that are egocentric rather than universal. The question is thus one of how we can ensure
that emotionally derived judgements are in fact impartial. This is an assessment we
readily perform in relation to the emotional responses of others. As Adam Smith noted,
608   Renée Jeffery

“The furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself
than against his enemies” if we deem his response unjustified (1984: I.I.I.7). But how can
we ensure impartiality in ourselves? It is here that we find a role for reason.
To explain how reason may judge and, indeed, moderate our emotional responses,
Amartya Sen draws on Adam Smith’s notion of the “impartial spectator,” an “imagined
ideal” to be cultivated to “temper [ . . . our] own tendency toward selfish anti-social
behaviour” (Smith 1984: I.I.3.1). The impartial spectator is a “judge within” that allows us
to view our own actions from a disinterested perspective, to determine whether others
would likely “go along with” our behaviour, and to temper our sentiments. For Smith,
this did not mean that our emotions are incapable of being impartial. On the contrary,
he understood that both reason and the emotions have the potential to be self-​serving
or to be objective or impartial. Rather, what Smith suggested was that the only way we
can know whether or not our emotional responses are impartial is to subject them to
reasoned scrutiny.
For Sen, however, the impartial spectator does not simply operate as a check on
impartiality but is the source of impartiality itself. According to his account, “[r]‌eason
and emotion play complementary roles in human reflection” (2009: 39). In particular,
while our emotional responses to the suffering we observe often serve to inspire our
moral deliberations about justice and injustice, reason allows us to make sense of com-
peting moral claims, complex patterns of causality, and conflicting emotional responses,
and to scrutinize our emotional responses to ensure they are appropriate and impartial.
Sen thus argues that the “demands of objectivity” force us to rely on “reason in mak-
ing ethical judgements” and require us to employ “a particular discipline of reasoning”
(2009: 40–​1). What this suggests is that, for him, emotions are the “subject matter for
reasoning,” rather than the basis of moral judgements themselves, while reason is the
exclusive source of objectivity (p. 50).

Conclusion

While Sen has gone some way toward incorporating the emotions into a cosmopol-
itan understanding of ethics, sentimentalist cosmopolitanism goes much further.
Sentimentalist cosmopolitan ethics accepts that reason plays an important role in
scrutinizing our emotions and acting as a check on the impartiality of our judgements.
Like Hume, however, it also maintains that emotions are moral judgements in and of
themselves. Where practical ethics are concerned, this is crucial. Reason, as we have
seen, does little to motivate us to act in response to injustice. Thus when Sen argues that
“[r]‌easoning is our ally” in making impartial judgements, he is only partially correct
(2009: 48).
Our other ally in a practical cosmopolitan ethic is emotion, a primary motivating
force that need not endanger our capacity for rational thought or our ability to make
impartial judgements. On the contrary, as mounting empirical evidence from the brain
 Emotions in IPT   609

sciences shows, it is when reason and emotion are combined that effective moral judge-
ments and ethical actions become possible. For IPT this must surely inspire a radical
rethinking of our most prominent accounts of moral deliberation, judgement, and
indeed action.

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 ­c hapter 46

The Eth i c s of
Rec o gnit i on i n
Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Anna Geis

Experiencing recognition in quite different contexts of their private and public life is
essential for all human beings. “Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe other people.
It is a vital human need” (Taylor 1994: 26). “Recognition” is an evaluative term that
involves judgements about meaning and worth. It is also a relational concept because
(mutual) recognition is regarded as a prerequisite for successful identity formation and
beneficial social interactions. Judging by the sheer amount of literature, recognition is a
prominent term in several disciplines such as social philosophy, psychology, sociology
and international law. Political “struggles for recognition” (Honneth 1995) have also
attracted increasing levels of attention from empirical political science and in peace and
conflict studies. Misrecognition, which individuals or collective actors experience as
humiliation, disrespect, or false representations of their identity, is seen as a major cause
of political resistance, and as significant in the escalation of potentially violent conflicts.
“Recognition” is a fuzzy term that is used quite differently by authors and speakers.
Far from being exhaustive, Ikäheimo and Laitinen (2011: 8–​10) discern three usages, the
boundaries of which are not always clear-​cut: first, the term can be used as synonym-
ous with “identification”; secondly, as roughly synonymously with “acknowledgment,”
which implies having “evaluative or normative entities or facts as its objects, so that
we can acknowledge something as valuable, as valid, as giving reasons, and so forth”
(Ikäheimo and Laitinen 2011: 8, emphasis original). The third usage is most promin-
ent in Hegel-​inspired accounts of recognition and refers to interpersonal recognition, as
exemplified by the works of Axel Honneth.
How useful is the application of recognition-​based perspectives in international
politics in the twenty-​ first century? The relevance of the topic in International
 The Ethics of Recognition in IPT    613

Political Theory (IPT) and empirical International Relations (IR) research is likely to
increase: debates in both sub-​disciplines have shown that the social fabric of today’s
globalizing world is marked by the pluralization of institutions and actors that “count”
and by the contestation of norms on the global, regional, and local level. The liberal
world order is seen as being in crisis (Dunne and Flockhart 2013). Both the rise of non-​
Western powers and transnational violent non-​state actors indicate the fragility of
Western hegemony. Ethical issues on how to deal with cultural diversity—​the plural-
ization of norms and values—​will thus not vanish from the agenda but prove to be per-
sistent challenges (cf. Brown 2000). Who deserves recognition and respect for what, by
whom and why? Whose identity claims and struggles for recognition are justified and
on what grounds? Which actors “count”? The institutionalized international order will
be characterized by a further politicization of such issues (Heins 2010: 154–​8).
This chapter proceeds as follows. First, the emerging body of literature on recog-
nition in IR is briefly outlined. This is followed by a discussion of three issue areas
of recognition-​related research, the relevance of which will probably increase in the
future. Since individuals, groups, and states struggle for recognition in politics, these
three basic types of actors will be considered separately in more detail. The section on
recognition in real-​world politics demonstrates that studies on “recognition” in inter-
national and transnational politics can hardly be accused of abstract normative the-
orizing about some utopian state of affairs, but that most of the existing work draws
from or contributes to empirical research (O’Neill and Smith 2012; Hayden and Schick
2016). The final section discusses the pitfalls of the overly optimistic and normatively
loaded concept of “recognition” in many of these studies. While (mis)recognition is
certainly a key concept with which to understand the central dynamics of social and
political conflicts, a generous politics of recognition cannot provide a panacea to all of
these ills.

Taking “Recognition” Beyond

the Domestic Sphere of Societies

The most intensive debates on “recognition” have taken place in Social Philosophy and
Political Theory, starting in the late 1980s and 1990s. The increase in different forms of
“identity politics” and “struggles for recognition” by minorities and social movements
in multicultural liberal societies at that time stimulated theorizing about these diver-
sified political phenomena (e.g. Fraser 1997; Fraser and Honneth 2003; Taylor 1994).
Recognition of a specific identity, of rights, or a certain status has been regarded as one
of the goals of (new) social movements organized around class, gender, sexuality, eth-
nicity, religion, or language. Social theorists have thus conceptualized recognition as a
means of realizing broader normative goals such as emancipation, dignity, justice, and
equality (Iser 2013).
614   Anna Geis

Drawing partly on Hegelian theoretical ideas1 and partly on empirical studies from
evolutionary psychology, recognition theorists conceive of recognition by other individ-
uals or by society as a vital human need (Ikäheimo 2009). It is only when an individual
is appreciated for having certain qualities that (s)he will be able to develop self-​esteem as
well as an “intact” personal identity (Taylor 1994: 26–​37). With regard to society, recog-
nition operates as a mechanism that constitutes a normative status (of equals) and allots
rights and duties within a society (Fraser 2000; Honneth 1995; 2012). Accordingly, acts
of misrecognition constitute acts of injustice in that they violate personal integrity and
impede people from becoming full members of a social collective. Experiences of mis-
recognition can provoke strong responses, including violent resistance, on the part of
affected individuals or social groups.
Axel Honneth’s influential studies on the key role of “recognition” are often cited as a
reference for recognition-​related works in IR and IPT (Haacke 2005: 191–​4). Honneth
conceives of capitalist societies as institutionalized recognition orders, and differen-
tiates three spheres of recognition: love focuses on persons as needy human beings,
respect focuses on the legal recognition of persons as bearers of equal rights (and duties),
and social esteem is derived from a person’s achievement and “value” within capitalist
society. Honneth pleads for locating “the core of all experiences of injustice in the with-
drawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of humiliation and disrespect” (Fraser
and Honneth 2003: 134). These two basic modes of misrecognition are also taken up in
IR/​IPT works on recognition.
It has taken rather long for scholars of IR to explore in more detail the extent to which
these concepts could be transferred to the international realm. Of course, recognition as
a diplomatic act between states is a very prominent issue in international law and also of
central concern for IR scholars, but the more diffuse social phenomena of (mis)recogni-
tion that could also include non-​state actors relate to much more than such formal acts
(Heins 2010: 166).2
Since recognition is closely linked to the formation of individual or group identities,
it is especially appealing to social constructivists seeking to adapt recognition-​related
concepts for the analysis of international politics, as Erik Ringmar (1996; 2002) and
Alexander Wendt (2003) demonstrated years ago. One of the main questions in
recognition-​related IR studies is whether and how the misrecognition of states or other
collective actors promotes violent conflict and, vice versa, whether and how recogni-
tion fosters peaceful relations. Desire for recognition can take different shapes: Wendt
(2003: 511–​12) introduced the notion of “thin” and “thick” recognition, and it has
been developed further by other authors (Allan and Keller 2012; Strömbom 2014;
Gustafsson 2016).
The increasing number of studies such as these demonstrates not only that state gov-
ernments escalate violent conflicts out of “brute” power politics or economic gains
but that “softer” factors which structure social interactions in an international rec-
ognition order must be taken more seriously (see e.g. Lindemann and Ringmar 2012;
Brincat 2014; Daase et al. 2015). According to Richard Ned Lebow (2008), the struggle
for standing and prestige of (putatively) “inferior” powers or of “rising” powers in the
 The Ethics of Recognition in IPT    615

regional or international system of states is a permanent feature of international polit-

ics and one of the causes of war. Thomas Lindemann (2010; 2014) investigates how the
claim for “hubristic identities,” the denial of equality, or the misrecognition of justified
demands cause conflicts to escalate. Reinhard Wolf (2011; 2014) argues that attaining
social respect is an important goal in international politics, and the non-​recognition of
social status can lead to serious conflict and even war. While introducing the norma-
tive concept of recognition, which is linked to “progressive” goals such as justice and
emancipation in political theory, enables IR researchers to gain new insights into con-
flict dynamics, researchers need to be aware of the strategic use of recognition and the
strategic value of reputation in international power struggles (cf. Lindemann 2012: 221).

Increasing Struggles for Recognition

in Real-​World Politics

Studies on recognition in international politics deal with the (de-​)legitimation of spe-

cific actors and the political dynamics of inclusion/​exclusion in international society
(Bartelson 2013; Onuf 2013). Recognition in real-​world politics is a gradual process, i.e.
empirical research is required in order to grasp this fuzzy concept. Recognition and
non-​recognition occur in complex and entangled forms, and constitute two poles on
a continuum of policies and outcomes, ranging from highly formalized to very infor-
mal modes of recognition. This notion of gradual recognition implies that recognition is
not only granted or withheld between actors of equal status but also within asymmetric
power relations (Daase et al. 2015).
This section briefly discusses three politicized issue areas that focus on different types
of actors in contemporary conflict settings: the first issue area concerns the struggles for
(status) recognition by so-​called “emerging powers,” the second focuses on negotiations
that have taken place with terrorist groups, and the third concentrates on the recogni-
tion of individuals as victims in violent conflicts.

Contestation of Liberal Hegemony: The Quest

for Status Recognition
States are formal equals: the idea of “sovereign equals” has shaped international law since
the end of the Second World War. However, the reality of international society shows
that some states are more equal than others. The era of liberal hegemony following the
end of the Cold War has been marked by normative changes that promoted human
rights and democracy as indicators of legitimate statehood, and by political practices
through which democratic states arrogated to themselves privileges in international
politics (Geis 2013). Within their institutionalized communities such as NATO and the
616   Anna Geis

European Union or their informal “clubs” such as the G7/​G8 (Gronau 2016), democratic
states recognize each other as fellow liberals constituting a “community of values,” and
tend to withhold such a positive moral evaluation from “outsiders” (Williams 2001).
Narratives traveling from academia to the practical realm such as “democratic peace”
(Geis et al. 2013) or “normative power Europe” (Whitman 2011) provide academic legit-
imacy for reproducing benign identity conceptions of democracies as the moral super-
iors of international society. “Democracy” has become the standard of civilization of
states in the twenty-​first century (Hobson 2015: 198–​200).
However, such self-​congratulatory narratives of superior democracies and liberal
norms and values are increasingly being challenged and contested by numerous “others.”
A general feature of social orders is that they are not static, uncontested sets of norms
and rules. Each normative order faces challenges and challengers, and self-​proclaimed
or appointed guardians of an order engage in ordering practices through (non-​)recog-
nition. More recently, narratives of the “return” of “authoritarian great powers” such as
Russia and China and the “rise” of regional “emerging powers” such as Brazil, South
Africa, and India have added a new twist to liberal world ordering practices. Debates
on global power transitions and the potential decline of “the West” raise the basic issue
of who governs the world—​and of who should govern it. The social hierarchy of a trans-
forming international society results in new dynamics of quests for status recognition
by specific powers. The experiences of centuries of brutal colonial subjugation (Fanon
2005), of contemporary unjust global governance arrangements, patronizing devel-
opment aid, and the military dominance of liberal democracies led many actors from
the global South to articulate the lack of respect they receive from actors in the global
North, and the absence of opportunities for equal participation in global institutions
(Dübgen 2012; Nel 2010). Feelings of disrespect or even humiliation are possible not
only in interpersonal relations but also in relations between states represented by indi-
viduals. This is not to say that states have emotions, but that individuals (inter)acting in
their name can feel disrespected and misrecognized and can express anger or frustra-
tion (Wolf 2011: 118–​20; see Chapter 45). Emerging powers in the global South struggle
for two types of recognition:

firstly, recognition in the form of respect for developing countries in terms of full and
equal membership and participation in multilateral institutions in general. [ . . . ] sec-
ondly, in the form of esteem for the specific and idiosyncratic developmental needs
of developing countries [ . . . ]. These two forms of recognition are constitutive of the
self-​respect and the self-​esteem that state agency in the society of states ultimately
depends upon. (Nel 2010: 955, emphasis added)

While the emerging (democratic) powers Brazil, South Africa, and India are regarded
with fewer reservations by the liberal democracies of the North and West, the scenarios
for relations with China and Russia are far more ambiguous, and even include the poten-
tial for military conflict. Both great powers are considered to be especially concerned
about their status and the social respect they feel entitled to (Forsberg et al. 2014). The
concept of status recognition is linked to a subjective evaluation of the self about the
 The Ethics of Recognition in IPT    617

respect one thinks one “deserves”; one expects this attitude of social respect then to be
shown by the way others treat us (Wolf 2011: 112; see Chapter 27).
China’s rapid economic growth, the size of its territory and population, its status as
one of the P5 in the UN Security Council, and its possession of nuclear weapons render
China a great power; but the ancient civilization has experienced a long history of vio-
lent subjugation, humiliation, and exclusion from clubs of “civilized” states (Ringmar
2015: 53–​9). China’s enduring ideological differences with Western powers, domestic
narratives of past victimization, the status of Taiwan, and maritime territorial disputes
with its neighbouring countries indicate insecurity about China’s status ambitions (cf.
Wolf 2014). There are rising anxieties among the Chinese elite and the population about
a loss of status; these concerns were fuelled by an emphasis on humiliation in narra-
tives of China’s self-​identity, promoted by a “patriotic education” campaign (Gustafsson
2016: 628–​9).
Russia’s status concerns are perceived as even more unsettling from a Western per-
spective. On the one hand, contemporary Russia is a “familiar” actor for “the West” and
a part of Europe—​on the other hand, it has remained an “other” to Europe that is met
with suspicion and could turn into a threat (Neumann 1998; Forsberg et al. 2014: 266).
Russia’s military interventions in the former Soviet Union’s territories and in Syria and
the annexation of the Crimea indicate that Russia is also willing to use force in order to
back up its status claims as a great power. “The idea of greatpowerness is understood as
forming the core of Russia’s state identity throughout centuries, including what we can
observe today” (Forsberg 2014: 323).
The end of the Cold War clearly divided the protagonists into winners and losers: “the
West” celebrated the triumph of democracy and liberalism and succeeded in enlarg-
ing the membership of NATO and the European Union and its liberal communities,
whereas the Soviet Union, a former superpower, collapsed, and communism declined
worldwide. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, famously described the demise of
the Soviet Union as one of the major geopolitical disasters of the twentieth century.
Although Russia has been included into governance arrangements that “count,” the
country’s leaders perceive Russia as denied the high social rank it deserves in inter-
national society. They claim that they are continuously humiliated by “the West,” threat-
ened by NATO’s eastern enlargement, and alienated by its military actions (Forsberg
2014). The point here is not to assess the extent to which such perceptions are accurate or
justified, but to include such subjective perceptions and demands for status recognition
in analyses of conflict escalation.

The Recognition of Violent Non-​state Actors: Negotiating

with Terrorists
The pluralization of non-​state actors in contemporary international society includes a
differentiation of violent actors that claim to fight for the rights of marginalized groups
or for a completely different world order (see Chapter 18). The proliferation of armed
618   Anna Geis

groups confronts ever more governments with the ethical question of whether nego-
tiations with groups labelled as “terrorists” are justifiable. Negotiating implies grad-
ual steps of recognizing and legitimizing the counterpart. Talking to terrorists is risky
(Miller 2011; Toros 2012). In successful cases, violent non-​state actors can be trans-
formed into non-​violent political parties, and the legitimate goals of such groups are
incorporated into state policy; in unsuccessful cases, violent groups can radicalize again,
and this can lead governments to be perceived as weak and susceptible to blackmailing.
Negotiating with terrorist groups contravenes the ethical core beliefs of elites and those
of populations.
Hence, many governments deny in public that they negotiate with groups they have
labelled “terrorists” (Toros 2008). Empirical research on the end of terrorism, how-
ever, shows that nearly 20 per cent of terrorist groups have entered negotiations, usually
secretly (Cronin 2009: 35–​72). Successful talks with terrorist groups are always fragile,
and depend on a number of conditions such as the mutual discursive reframing of the
conflict parties, specific leadership structures within the groups, the careful separation
of negotiable goals from non-​negotiable issues, a mutual perception of a “stalemate” in
the conflict, and accepted mediators (Zartman 2009; Goerzig 2010).
The complex role of recognition in dealing with terrorist groups (whether domestic
“ethnopolitical,” revolutionary groups or transnational “religious” networks) merits far
more attention by researchers, but this sensitive empirical field is also difficult to access.
Terrorism is sometimes presented as a “weapon of the weak” in asymmetric conflicts,
which refers to the role of misrecognition. The rise of transnational Islamist terrorist
networks forces many actors to position themselves with regards to these issues. One
important question is under what conditions feelings of disrespect and humiliation lead
to a radicalization of a non-​state group (Clément 2014) or, vice versa, whether gradual
recognition can result in deradicalization (Biene and Daase 2015).
Recognition of political actors often occurs in gradual steps, and is not necessarily an
intended result but an eventual outcome of negotiations. In order to grasp such differ-
ent degrees of “recognition as,” Biene and Daase (2015: 223–​5) suggest the identification
of several “recognition events.” They assume that non-​state actors can seek recognition
strategically so that the gradual granting of recognition could influence their strategic
options: the first step is “thin” recognition as a party to the conflict. This is relevant, since
states often try to deny the existence of a conflict or to delegitimize violent non-​state
actors. The next step is acceptance as a participant in informal talks, indicating their
relevance in the present and the future for the successful management of the conflict.
The third step is the invitation to participate in formal talks. This move signals that “the
state government acknowledges not only the existence and status of the non-​state actor,
but also the possibility that it might have legitimate claims to bring to the table” (Biene
and Daase 2015: 224). A final degree of recognition is realized if a non-​state actor is rec-
ognized as a political authority, as a legitimate representative of a collective with the cap-
acity to enforce binding decisions.
The history of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), of the Irish political
party Sinn Féin, the recurring international demands to include the Taliban officially in
 The Ethics of Recognition in IPT    619

peace talks in Afghanistan, and the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian gov-
ernment and the FARC–​EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–​People’s Army)
are just a few examples that show negotiations with actors that have been depicted as
abhorrent enemies or as “evil” do take place. The distrust that they often continue to
experience is but a weak indicator of the painful ethical choices political actors face in
real-​world politics. Many actors usually have strong reservations about granting ex-​
combatants “thick recognition,” which means that “each party needs to understand the
Other in terms of essential elements composing its identity” (Allan and Keller 2012: 77).
A majority of victims of violence by non-​state actors often struggle for recognition
as well.

The Recognition of Victims in Transitional

Justice Processes
“Dealing with the past,” establishing a new (more democratic) post-​violence regime,
and promoting reconciliation among conflict parties require mechanisms of retribu-
tive and restorative justice (see Chapter 12) that involve several dimensions of recogni-
tion, in particular the recognition of victims, their suffering in the past, and their agency
in the future. While the earlier debate on transitional justice focused on the tensions
between peace-​building and implementing justice, greater concern has been focused
on the needs and rights of the victims since the mid-​2000s (van Boven 2013). What
some authors today describe as a “victims-​turn” in transitional justice (García-​Godos
2016: 350) is embedded in a broader normative development concerning the protection
of civilians in armed conflicts.
Why do individuals (or groups) want to be recognized as “victims”? The very label
“victim” is ambivalent, since it has the capacity to stigmatize and empower at the same
time. However, there is a striking absence of “the victim” as a political actor in transi-
tional justice literature (García-​Godos 2016: 357–​8): “victimhood” invokes notions of
suffering but also of passivity, a lack of agency. The institutionalization of international
criminal justice and the professionalization of transitional justice since the 1990s include
an increasing international acknowledgment of the status of victims, awarding them
more rights to directly participate in trials and to claim reparations. The UN General
Assembly and the UN Commission on Human Rights endorsed several important
documents in 2005 on reparation and impunity principles that acknowledge special
rights for victims in violent conflicts, such as the right to know, the right to justice, and
the right to reparation as well as guarantees of non-​recurrence (van Boven 2013: 21). This
normative trend towards “reparative justice,” however, is more impressive in the way it
is spelled out in international documents than in the reality of violent (post-​)conflict
settings.
The recognition of individual rights and a certain status is an important dimension in
acknowledging a victim’s suffering but also her/​his ability to regain agency, for example,
as a participant in trials and as a rightful claimant to material compensation. Apart
620   Anna Geis

from this, victims of war crimes struggle for the restoration of their dignity as human
beings, an aspect they were denied completely during the violent conflict (Haldemann
2008: 679). It is thus important to create opportunities for them to tell their individ-
ual stories and to make their experiences visible in society. Their participation as wit-
nesses in criminal trials or in truth and reconciliation commission hearings has often
been assessed as an inadequate form of acknowledgment, so that further innovations
in transitional justice practices are advisable.3 Symbolic forms of recognition of victims
should also be offered by the perpetrators or those who are authorized to speak in their
name (Haldemann 2009: 726–​7). Public apologies by state officials who acknowledge
the suffering of the victims, the responsibility for the crimes committed, and the polit-
ical nature of these crimes are risky speech acts—​they can have very positive effects in
transitional justice, but public apologies can also be rejected by victims if such apologies
are perceived as strategically motivated.
Among the types of recognition discussed here, the moral recognition of victims of
international crimes might appear as the least controversial from a normative point of
view. However, critical studies in transitional justice have pointed out that normative
ambiguities also emerge in this field: the binary categories of “victims” and “perpet-
rators” have questionable essentializing labelling and ordering effects that can hamper
reconciliation efforts (Renner 2013). In addition, one can often observe the discursive
constitution of “good victims” who deserve recognition and reparation and “bad vic-
tims” who are considered undeserving and whose suffering is rendered invisible. This
discrimination is usually a result of the interests of the ruling political elites: several tran-
sitional justice regimes (e.g. Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Colombia) demonstrate these
exclusionary effects in that victims of non-​state violent actors (e.g. those of Colombia’s
FARC–​EP) are granted recognition, whereas victims of repressive state violence are dis-
respected or simply ignored (Humphrey 2013).

Conclusion: The Dark Sides

of Recognition

Recognition studies offer useful theoretical and analytical frameworks for the inves-
tigation of the psychological needs of actors and their social embeddedness in (hier-
archical) communities/​societies. Empirical studies of humiliation and disrespect help
to explain political resistance and the escalation of violent conflicts. Normative recog-
nition theories address social practices which are central to moral inquiry, and explicate
the conditions that would be needed for more just institutions and emancipatory prac-
tices (Iser 2013). Transferring the social concept of recognition to international politics
has inspired a growing number of studies in IPT/​IR that are well connected with real-
world politics—​as this chapter has sought to show.
Viewing the social world through a “recognition lens” has many merits, and will cer-
tainly inspire further studies in IPT/​IR, but employing the concept of recognition also
 The Ethics of Recognition in IPT    621

entails some pitfalls that warrant further reflection: many studies on struggles for recog-
nition have focused on identity issues. With regard to the domestic sphere of capitalist
societies, Nancy Fraser (2000: 107) has rightly criticized such a narrow conceptualiza-
tion as displacing the important issue of material redistribution and leading to a reifica-
tion of group identities.
So far, there is also a tendency in IPT/​IR to focus more closely on identity issues than
on redistribution issues (but see Heins 2010 or Nel 2010). Those researchers who pro-
vide case studies on state identities in order to demonstrate the effects of misrecognition
in international politics face a similar problem to that indicated by Fraser. If one studies
“misrecognition”—​when actors believe that their state is being recognized in a way that
is not in line with how they see their state’s particular identity (Gustafsson 2016: 617)—​
an assumption is made that a state has a form of identity that can be represented in an
accurate and adequate manner. However, it is well known that collective identities are
never homogeneous or uncontested (Duncombe 2016: 626). A similar problem occurs
when studying radicalized non-​state actors and their non-​recognition. If Islamist ter-
rorist groups engage in the discursive construction of a global war between “the West”
and “the Muslim world,” then another variant of essentializing and homogenizing col-
lective identity constructions is in play (Clément 2014: 435). Researchers therefore need
to be cautious with regard to the manner in which they relate themselves to their objects
of study.
Which claims for recognition are normatively justified is a controversial political
question, since not all such claims—​e.g. group rights, cultural peculiarities, “inflated”
identities, or status ambitions—​“deserve” recognition. Empirically, the criteria for the
(il)legitimacy of claims and struggles have differed across societies and have changed
throughout history, also in terms of their normative content. In addition, actors can use
claims for recognition strategically, employing the positive denotation of the term in
order to cloak more mundane goals such as attaining hegemony. Again, violent non-​
state actors can also engage in such practices—​for example, by advancing recognition
claims on behalf of specific groups in order to gain control of these groups (Clément
2014: 431).
The term “recognition” is part of a semantic field that is shaped by other positive terms
such as respect, love, care, (self-​)esteem, status, prestige, or honour, and it suggests a
certain reciprocity and a positive evaluation (Iser 2013; Onuf 2013). While the positive
effects that recognition often has should certainly be acknowledged, “recognition” is an
ambiguous concept in politics, and far more empirical research is needed on it in the
field of international politics (Daase et al. 2015). Paradoxical as it may sound, recogni-
tion can also lead to misrecognition, and sometimes actors might not even be aware
that this is occurring. Post-​structuralist and post-​colonial theorizing has criticized
modes of domination and the dynamics of processes of inclusion/​exclusion generated
by recognition politics. The recognition of a social group by the dominant, hegemonic
culture of a society can also imply its “assimilation” and conformism with ruling ideolo-
gies, as authors such as Franz Fanon, Louis Althusser, and Jean-​Paul Sartre have argued.
The result can be misrecognition of the self or reification of a fixed and putative iden-
tity, instead of liberation or progress. Hence, recognition is also a technology of social
622   Anna Geis

differentiation that establishes layers of legitimacy and social hierarchies (Markell 2003;
Iser 2013).
A final remark on the self-​recognition of “the West” and global power asymmetries
is due: Western self-​representations have created benign narratives such as “demo-
cratic peace,” “forces for good,” or “normative power Europe.” How resonant are such
self-​representations in the eyes of the “others”? In reviewing the recent literature for this
contribution, it is striking how many state actors from the “global South” and violent
non-​state actors articulate being disrespected by “the West” or specific Western pow-
ers; some even speak of humiliation. This is, of course, not a new complaint—​but its
relevance will increase again. It is a crucial ethical question for all, not just in academia,
to relate to such articulations. The liberal world order in transition will be shaped by
ever-​new struggles for recognition and a renewed politicization of cultural diversity.
Most actors within “the West” might feel misrecognized by such malign representations
and will also engage in their own quests for recognition. Paul Ricoeur reminded us that
struggles for recognition can become an infinite, insatiable demand: “When, we may
ask, does a subject deem him-​or herself to be truly recognized?” (Ricoeur 2005: 217).

Notes
1. Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave developed in 1807 in the Phenomenology of Spirit is
one major source for the philosophical foundation of recognition theories (e.g. Markell
2003: 90–​122).
2. This contribution does not deal with formal recognition between states. See e.g. Fabry
(2010).
3. A case in point is the Women’s Court in Sarajevo, held in 2015 (see Clarke 2016).

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 ­c hapter 47

Republica ni sm a nd
Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Steven Slaughter

While there are various accounts of republicanism, in recent decades republican pol-
itical theory has gone through a significant revival in the form of neo-​Roman republic-
anism. This revival is attributable to writers such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit,
who claim that the ascendance of liberalism misses a distinct phase of Western history
in which a republican-​inspired conception of liberty, government, and citizenship pre-
vailed which “slipped from sight” during the nineteenth century (Skinner 1998: ix). The
neo-​Roman account has been chiefly articulated by Pettit, and is currently the predom-
inant tradition of republicanism. Despite this revival, International Political Theory
(IPT) has tended to overlook republican political theory, and the international dimen-
sions of republicanism are still a subject of debate. Yet at the core of republicanism is the
idea that the citizen is central to the way that power and liberty can be institutionalized
in both domestic and world politics. This account sees international and domestic pol-
itics as being joined, because, as Nicholas Onuf (1998: 18) claims, “the twinned concern
for the local and universal is a republican legacy.”
This chapter contends that republicanism’s focus on power and liberty makes a dis-
tinctive and important contribution to IPT, and that despite the influence of Pettit’s
account, important debates about how republicanism can operate in respect to contem-
porary globalization are ongoing. In particular, this chapter contends that republican
theory needs to complement the institutional and constitutional account of republican
government exemplified by Pettit, with a greater focus on republican citizenship and
the variegated civic efforts conducted by citizens and activists to promote liberty in the
context of globalization. This broader consideration of citizens acting both through
and beyond the state is a crucial part of the future of republicanism as a form of IPT,
and requires engagement with critical forms of political theory. The chapter there-
fore first outlines the core features of the contemporary republican position evident in
 Republicanism and IPT   627

the scholarship of Pettit. It then orientates republican theory with respect to the main
accounts of IR scholarship, and emphasizes more recent engagements between repub-
licanism and critical theory. Lastly, the chapter outlines the ways that the republican
approach can address key problems in contemporary global politics.

Republicanism

While “republicanism” is a term with a variety of related meanings, two distinct accounts
of political theory are normally discerned (Maynor 2003: 10–​13). The first is the “neo-​
Athenian” account, which takes Ancient Greece as its reference point, and claims that
the pathway to self-​mastery is via membership of a democratic community where active
participation in political life enables individuals to fully realize their political nature.
Such an account of the intrinsic value of political community is seen in contemporary
communitarian political theory, as evident in the work of Michael Sandel and Alasdair
MacIntyre. The second is the neo-​Roman account, which was first articulated in pol-
itical reflections during the Italian Renaissance on the lessons of the Roman republic
(509–​27 bc). This account focuses upon the development of a civic form of individual
liberty which considers the consequences of power and seeks to avoid the dangers of
tyranny and corruption. This account depends upon citizens having a responsibility for
the activities of government that are enshrined in the political institutions and culture
of political life, but sees this activity as having instrumental value in achieving liberty
rather than being intrinsically valuable. This tradition of thought was subsequently evi-
dent in the revolutions in England, France, and America. The contemporary revival of
the neo-​Roman republican tradition has been led by Skinner and Pettit in conjunction
with other political theorists (Bellamy 2002; Dagger 2006; Laborde 2010; Maynor 2003;
Viroli 1995).
Contemporary neo-​Roman republicanism is centred on reviving a particular concep-
tion of liberty. According to republican thought, liberty is not a natural attribute of indi-
viduals, but rather a civic achievement that requires an institutionalized context where
individuals are equally free from arbitrary forms of power and domination. This concern
for domination leads republican scholars to focus upon the overarching goal of develop-
ing a robust form of individual liberty conceived as “non-​domination,” where citizens
are free from the arbitrary interference or subordination by the state itself or from other
actors in society (Pettit 1999a: 80). Pettit contends that the republican conception of lib-
erty “consists not in the presence of self-​mastery, and not in the absence of interference
by others, but in the absence of mastery by others: in absence [ . . . ] of domination”
(Pettit 1999b: 165). For republicans, it is the capacity for arbitrary or uncontrolled inter-
ference which restricts liberty, and they often use the metaphor of slavery to indicate
that it is the status and condition of being a slave which restricts liberty, not the actual
interference by a master who may be benevolent or kind and not interfere. Therefore
this conception seeks to avoid servility, and is distinct from the communitarian account
628   Steven Slaughter

of self-​mastery and the liberal understanding of liberty as non-​interference. In contrast

to liberalism, republicanism claims that non-​arbitrary forms of interference constituted
by the laws and institutions of an appropriately empowered state can directly address
various forms of domination.
This conception of non-​domination is enabled by four interconnected elements of
republican practice. The first element is the development of a constitutional state which
exerts power to establish non-​domination through publically developed laws and pol-
icies. The republican objective is to develop the rule of law where individuals are free
from both domination by the state (imperium) and from domination by powerful or
sectional interests from society (dominium) (Pettit 1999a: 13). Imperium is chiefly con-
trolled by dispersing the power of state by means of various democratic and legal checks
and balances evident in the separation of powers and federalism. Preventing dominium
requires developing laws and policies which protect individuals and dampen the flows
of power which adversely affect them, as well as publicly developed laws which aug-
ment the capacity of individuals to protect themselves from subjection (Pettit 1999a: ch.
5; 2014: ch. 5). This view of an active and empowered state which intervenes in society
to promote the public good and common liberty of that society contrasts with the lib-
eral view that states should be minimal or neutral frameworks for political action (Pettit
1999a: 112). Republicanism sees the state as clearly orientating the political field towards
the cause of non-​domination because citizens give the state a stronger sense of agency to
identify and address public concerns borne out of a historical sense of community and
collective responsibility for each other’s liberty.
The second element is the practice of democracy where the government of a repub-
lican state is managed by procedural checks and balances as well as by democratic
processes of contestation which encompass both electoral representation and citizen-​
initiated plebiscitary procedures (Pettit 1999b). Democracy operates as a crucial pro-
cess of self-​government which publicly constitutes and constrains the power of the state
in order to enable that power to be non-​arbitrary. On one hand, democratic processes
develop a strong sense of political responsibility and accountability of the state to the citi-
zenry, and on the other, democracy frames a robust conception of political responsibil-
ity of citizens to direct the power of the state to address public concerns. Contemporary
republicans realize that, given the complexity of the contemporary context of policy-​
making, this responsibility may involve significant activity from specialized civil-​society
organizations to publicly consider and critique government decisions (Pettit 2014: 132–​
3). However, because this collective responsibility operates in a democratic context, a
key feature of this relationship is one where governments are also responsive through
formal democratic, judicial, and administrative avenues of “contestatory democracy” to
ensure that aberrant government decisions that fail to promote non-​domination can be
challenged by judicial and plebiscitary procedures (Pettit 2006: 304). However, such an
account does not mean that republicanism endorses a form of direct democracy where
the citizens are required to consider every political decision.
The third element of republican practice is an active conception of citizenship which
is manifest in an enduring culture of patriotism and civic virtue. Such a conception of
 Republicanism and IPT   629

citizenship encompasses involvement in political life, political responsibility for the

state, and public deliberation in civil society. This culture is understood as a historic-
ally developed sense of responsibility for the norms and institutions that make liberty
possible in a particular state and a form of equality and reciprocity between republican
citizens (Viroli 1995: 2). These responsibilities stem from practised forms of solidarity
evident in the republican ideals of “liberty, equality, community” (Pettit 1999a: ch. 4;
Maynor 2003). Republicans are keen to indicate that solidarity and community mem-
bership are an important part of the lived practices of responsibility and reciprocity
which stem from a self-​interest in collectively avoiding domination, rather than respon-
sibilities of an abstract legal or philosophical nature. While these forms of solidarity are
a “thick” sense of moral responsibility, republicans are keen to emphasize the political
nature of patriotism and citizenship rather than nationalism. According to Maurizio
Viroli (1995: 13), patriotism is primarily motivated by “shared memories” of the desire to
live in a country characterized by liberty, and by “resistance against oppression and cor-
ruption” rather than a commitment to cultural homogeneity and ethnic nationalism. In
short: while nationalism may be a “partial replacement” for patriotism (Miller 1999: 67),
it is not sufficient for the active and political conception of citizenship required to con-
trol a republican state.
The fourth element is the international context required to support the republican
state. Republicanism’s conception of individual liberty requires a “free state,” because
“we cannot consider ourselves in possession of our liberty unless we live as citizens of a
state which is free not merely from internal domination by monarchs or oligarchies, but
also from external domination by other states” (Skinner 2010: 100). Avoiding external
domination and dependency requires various military and diplomatic capacities; but
the republican tradition’s development of law and institutions to enable liberty domes-
tically is also reflected in the external vision of republicanism which seeks to institu-
tionally moderate the capacity of powerful states or transnational actors to dominate
(Pettit 2014: ch. 6; 2010; Slaughter 2005; Laborde and Ronzoni 2016). Consequently,
Pettit’s account of republicanism is based on the view that various publics around the
world need to direct their respective states to collaboratively develop various forms of
international law that further the cause of non-​domination by constraining the power of
states and non-​state actors (Pettit 2010: 79–​86; 2014: 153). Pettit (2014: 153) couches this
legal activity in terms of an ideal framework of “globalized sovereignty.” This is founded
on the recognition that the liberty and sovereignty of people in a state is dependent
upon common global rules and forms of governance. Putting it another way, Richard
Beardsworth (2015: 78) indicates that the delegation of sovereignty to effectively pro-
tect its population from transnational threats is a fundamental political responsibility
that a state has to its population: “they have the duty, that is, to pool and/​or yield exter-
nal sovereignty (sovereign independence) in order to maintain internal sovereignty
(the maintenance of primary domestic state functions).” This account sees international
institutions as an expression of sovereignty, not an abridgement of sovereignty.
This account of globalized sovereignty recognizes that while republican states will
extend their sovereignty to international institutions to moderate arbitrary power, it
630   Steven Slaughter

accepts that not all states are going to be republican and thus supports the sovereignty
of all societies—​republican or not. As such, Pettit is couching his argument in a manner
very similar to John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples, and therefore emphasizes the feasibility
of his account with respect to existing political conditions (Pettit 2010: 153–​9). However,
the substance of the international elements of republicanism are more contested than
the preceding elements of the republican corpus. In particular, the impact of contem-
porary globalization and of non-​state actors leads to markedly different accounts within
contemporary republican theory as to what forms of governance and political activity
republicanism requires. It is thus necessary to orientate republicanism with respect to
existing positions within IR theory and IPT.

Republicanism and the Study

of International Relations

In advancing the importance of international cooperation and power, republican-

ism intersects with both realist and liberal positions in IR theory. In particular Daniel
Deudney (2007: 4) claims that realism and liberalism are “incomplete fragments” and
the intellectual decedents of nineteenth-​century republican thought (see also Onuf
1998: 13–​16). While republicanism is clearly evident in liberalism’s focus on individual
liberty, democratic states, and the importance of international cooperation and insti-
tutions, realism’s focus on the state, prudence, and power in the context of anarchy also
demonstrates nineteenth-​century republican preoccupations with security. Indeed
Deudney (2007: 7) claims that realism specifically “emerged from reflections on the
security of republican, democratic, and liberal polities.” Thus the position that develops
out of republicanism is one which seeks to facilitate the democratic existence of states
in a way which avoids the alternatives of hierarchy and anarchy among states. In this
view, states delegate public power to international institutions as a necessary response to
ways destructive forces change via technological developments which enable violence to
be exercised over greater geographic contexts, which thereby necessitates arrangements
that can be confederal or even federal in response to continental and global impacts
of violence and insecurity (Deudney 2007: 13–​16). Deudney sees security as involving
domestic and international politics in a manner which relates to both realism and liber-
alism, while also proposing political solutions which require international cooperation
in a manner congruent to Pettit and other contemporary republicans.
While Deudney’s argument ultimately appears similar to liberal accounts of inter-
national cooperation, it articulates a more demanding picture for the creation of an
international order which entails common forms of governance between states. In one
sense this is evident in the historical argument developed by Deudney. While most neo-​
Roman scholarship sees the republican account as an interconnected series of histor-
ical reflections on the lessons learnt from Rome, which in turn also has reflections on
 Republicanism and IPT   631

ancient Greece, Deudney’s account outpaces contemporary republican scholarship by

arguing that republican polities from the polis onwards were actually responding to
internal and external threats to the polity. Deudney does give a historical illustration as
to how the dynamics of providing liberty and security shaped external political relations
in the early history of the USA. He contends that from 1781 until 1861 the “Philadelphian
system” existed at the edge of the Westphalian system operating within Europe, and that
the states of the American Union “went beyond confederation,” but fell short of being an
internally sovereign state (Deudney 2007: 161). Consequently, Deudney (p. 179) offers a
historically grounded account of what the external dimensions of republicanism might
resemble in practice by claiming that the external ethos of the American Union could
best be referred to as “negarchy,” as the Union sought to avoid the alternatives of hier-
archy and anarchy among its composite states. This account offers an interesting con-
trast to the idea of sovereignty being uniform and ubiquitous, yet still echoes Pettit’s
institutional account of globalized sovereignty and the distinctly republican refrain that
cooperation between republican states is normal and necessary.
Despite the idea of globalized sovereignty accurately capturing the international
dimensions of republicanism, there are some dissenting views as to how the republican
tradition should be externally developed in a context of globalization. First, there is the
position of Jose Luis Martí (2010) that a global republic or a civitas maxima should be
developed in an era of globalization, with a global constitution which constrains all act-
ors in manner stronger than articulated by Pettit. This view embraces the idea of enact-
ing a centralized global state, and is similar to the approach of cosmopolitan democracy
(see Held 1995). Second, there is the transnational position of James Bohman, which
concurs with the general republican argument for international law but advances the
more radical argument that non-​domination requires citizens to have an active capacity
to “create and modify their own obligations and duties” rather than these being devel-
oped from the responsibilities of citizens to the republican state (Bohman 2008: 197;
2007: 55). This entails the capacity for citizens to initiate global political deliberation,
which requires that some aspects of citizenship be global in scope and be committed to
the liberty of all humanity (Bohman 2008: 192). This mean that a republic must ensure
that its boundaries and membership remain “open” (Bohman 2008: 208). This fluid
vision of republicanism differs significantly from Pettit’s focus on the constitutionalism
of the state.
Common to these two dissenting views is the idea that Pettit’s account of globalized
sovereignty assumes too much when it contends that states are the most important act-
ors in world politics. However, while the focus on the state needs to be questioned given
the ongoing impact of contemporary globalization, the realization of a republican civi-
tas maxima seems as far away as ever, despite the proliferation of global forms of gov-
ernance. Furthermore, Bohman’s idea of citizens being committed to all of humanity
appears to be beset by questions regarding the willingness of citizens to support this
responsibility. However, while Bohman’s synthesis of republicanism and cosmopolitan-
ism is open to the charge that he neglects fundamental questions about how republican
citizens are nurtured, there is no doubt that transnational reflection and action in regard
632   Steven Slaughter

to domination is required in the context of globalization (Slaughter 2014). Furthermore,

there is increasing recognition of the importance of transnational activism in contesting
political authority and dominant ideas and discourses in world politics (Dryzek 2006).
Thus there is a need to support Pettit’s focus on the republican state and extending sov-
ereignty to encompass greater consideration of transnational activism and political
deliberation, because the types of domination that republicanism needs to consider are
fluid and changing, especially with regards to transnational problems and harms which
affect particular groups and locales in diverse ways. Consequently, it is the case that the
types of political institutions and the dispositions of citizens need to also adapt to chan-
ging political, economic, cultural, and technological dynamics.
However, this chapter contends that Bohman’s focus on republican citizens and
transnational reflection shifts republicanism in a more radical and critical direction,
away from liberalism and issues of institutional design. It is important to emphasize
that republicanism does have a heritage which includes a more radical legacy, based
upon balancing competing interests in society and striving for an egalitarian society,
which also focuses upon the roles of citizens in political life (Bellamy 2002). The best-​
developed engagement of republicanism with critical thought is the position termed
“critical republicanism” by Cécile Laborde (2010: 50), which derives from “Frankfurt-​
style critical theory an interest in social critique and in social change” and starts by
considering existing institutions and relationships in order to “identify their dominat-
ing and oppressive features, and advocate their transformation” (see Chapter 6). This
position illustrates some of the sympathies between republicanism’s attention to non-​
domination and critical theory’s consideration of emancipation, while recognizing and
valuing the wide-​ranging empirical work into domination conducted by critical theory,
post-​structuralism, and related fields of scholarship. While this position disagrees with
Bohman’s account of global citizenship and asserts that citizens still need to relate to
republican states, it reiterates the republican impulse that “domestic and international
reform must go hand in hand” (Laborde 2010: 64). It is also open to more diverse pol-
itical practices beyond the republican state which have the capacity to identify forms of
domination and promote non-​domination.
It is important to indicate that the idea of critical republicanism is an interpret-
ation that emphasizes particular aspects of republicanism and does not dismiss Pettit’s
account. In particular, it contends that republicanism needs to more fully consider
the civic roles of citizens in an era of various forms of transnational activism, and thus
pay more attention to practical ways that domination can be identified and addressed
by citizens acting outside the state. While republicanism certainly possesses an insti-
tutional account of political activity, as evident in the conception of globalized sover-
eignty, it also has the intellectual resources to support a civic account that sees citizens
as being active political actors who work through and beyond the state as activists who
seek to realize non-​domination. Such activity is evident in the claim of James Tully
(2014: 33–​6) that citizenship includes both “civil” activity related to authority and “civic”
activity generated by various overlapping forms of political activity generated by groups
of citizens separate from the activity of states. Such civic activity is referred to as “diverse
 Republicanism and IPT   633

citizenship,” and refers to various cooperative forms of activity created by traditional

indigenous ways of organization, lived cooperative economic collectives, or activist net-
works (Tully 2014: 33–​6). Furthermore, Stuart White (2002: 258–​60) sees the possibility
of various forms of “transnational republican solidarity” between citizens and activ-
ists of different states. These types of political activity have a capacity to transcend the
republican state. Indeed, Onuf (1998: 18) indicates that republicans call for both “local
civic activism and a cosmopolitan view of the human condition,” and attempt “to resolve
the tension implicit in this polarity to the benefit of their communities and the world
as a whole.” The goal here is to develop citizens who are able to bridge the gap between
republican thought and various forms of political practice that promote non-​domin-
ation in the context of globalization.
Consequently we can see that republicanism is a tradition that encompasses institu-
tional activity and civic activity which has normative assumptions and implications that
bisect existing positions within IPT scholarship. In particular, republicanism possesses
both communitarian/​particularist and cosmopolitan/​universalist aspects (see Chapter
3). The republican conception of justice is one of liberty understood as non-​domination,
and republicans see the domination of others as cause for real moral concern wherever it
occurs (Pettit 2014: xxiii). This is a universal concern that animates a generalized aspir-
ation for the minimization of vulnerability and subjection. While this extended concern
does seem to move republicanism towards cosmopolitanism, republicanism possesses
an account of political community that advances the idea that being a citizen is not an
abstract status or only a bundle of rights but an ongoing responsibility for the political
operation of the state. While republicanism does not actively embed ethnic or national-
istic norms or a predefined conception of the good life, it is founded on political virtues
and norms which revolve around public responsibility and oversight. Thus contem-
porary republicans see “freedom as a particular and contingent achievement” which
depends upon lived political responsibilities between citizens and the state which rely
on specific forms of trust and reciprocity, and at “the global level, it is not possible to
reproduce the practices, institutions and virtue essential to founding and maintaining
republics” (Laborde 2010: 49; see Pettit 2014: 157–​9). Ultimately, without an empowered
world state that is checked and balanced, it is the case that while republicanism’s asser-
tion of non-​domination is universal, the political means whereby non-​domination is
enacted are not.
A joint consideration of both republican and diverse citizenship has the potential
to contribute to republican theory. Yet it should be noted that, while Pettit’s focus on
augmenting the state has an institutional focus, it is possible to extend his account of
contestatory democracy to regional and international forums as another check against
arbitrary power. Citizens, for example, could have plebiscitary or “editorial” options to
appeal to IGOs when state leaders fail to address domination (Pettit 2006: 16–​20), which
therefore opens up space for the input of transnational civil-​society organizations. The
important upshot of republican citizens is that they could reinforce globalized sov-
ereignty. However, even this consideration of the impact of activists needs to be both
broader and more radical. The further engagement of republican thought with critical
634   Steven Slaughter

and post-​colonial forms of thought is required to reflect on the ways historical injustice
frames and constitutes domination. While this is an issue that Pettit (2014: 153) expli-
citly leaves aside, given the structural and discursive effects of colonialism and post-​
colonialism on developed, indigenous, and developing societies around the world, it
requires further consideration from those involved in the republican tradition. This is
not to say that diverse forms of citizenship are in themselves sufficient to address all
forms of domination (Bell 2014), but rather that republicanism needs to consider vari-
ous practices that attempt to moderate domination beyond the traditional institutions
proposed by republican thought. Given the nature of global problems facing citizens,
more attention also needs to be paid to the challenges facing citizens who operate both
to direct their state and to act within the channels of transnational civil society to pro-
mote non-​domination. This will require citizens to consider domination and non-​
domination in more specific empirical terms.

Republicanism and Real-​World

Politics

While problems of tyranny from autocrats and oligarchies still persist in the world, the
types of domination confronting contemporary republicans are more diffuse, complex,
and global than the ones facing early modern republicans. Indeed, it is clear that con-
temporary globalization creates a range of challenges which transcend states and require
globalized sovereignty. First, the republican response to the issue of international secur-
ity is to focus on ways to promote law and restraint in domestic and international polit-
ical contexts. As Pettit’s idea of globalized sovereignty outlines, non-​domination is only
possible in the context of mutual institutional restraint between states. In a similar vein,
Deudney (2007: 252–​9) emphasizes the importance of both international arms control
agreements and domestic checks and balances over nuclear weapon use in order to pro-
mote nuclear restraint. There is also a concern for the internal operation of states built
into republican thought which is apposite for the pervasive nature of civil conflict and
instability within states around the world in recent decades. While Pettit acknowledges
that not all states will be republican, it is the case that republican IPT would clearly
encourage and develop states which are republican, or at least representative, and there-
fore help other societies to develop their own locally responsive forms of state practice.
This is not to say that republicanism would support all liberal arguments for peace-​
building. Michael Barnett (2006: 90) has criticized contemporary liberal post-​conflict
reconstruction as being too dogmatic in terms of what rebuilding a post-​conflict soci-
ety would look like, and claims that “republicanism’s emphasis on deliberative processes
allows space for societal actors to determine for themselves what the good life is and
how to achieve it.” While such activity may be driven by the needs of republican states
to promote global security, international efforts to promote human security and create
 Republicanism and IPT   635

local political agency which articulates the needs of post-conflict society must be para-
mount (Pettit 2014: 186).
Second, the republican response to economic issues such as global poverty and
global financial instability is one borne out of the impulse to regulate and “constrain”
capitalist markets (Dagger 2006: 160; Slaughter 2005; Laborde and Ronzoni 2016).
Republicanism’s aim is a society of common liberty where everyone is free from dom-
ination, not a society where wealth is maximized. This position contrasts significantly
with prevailing liberal and neo-​liberal impulses. Indeed, “conspicuously missing from
republican thought throughout its long and complex history is any conception of eco-
nomic activity, of the economy as a sphere of activity that can (if given a chance) operate
according to its own logic” (Onuf 1998: 247). Pettit sees republicanism as falling short
of a socialist agenda by protecting private property and promoting the socioeconomic
independence of people from the will of others (Pettit 1997a: 158–​63). Thus there is sup-
port within republicanism for unconditional minimum-​income models and the pro-
vision of public goods such as education and health. Republicanism will also support
inheritance taxes and “progressive consumption” taxes in order to prevent inequality
(Dagger 2006: 164–​5). For this to occur within any state, common rules will be required
within the account of globalized sovereignty to ensure that transnational businesses are
held to common laws and forms of taxation. Furthermore, any assistance to developing
countries needs to be conducted on a multilateral rather than a bilateral basis in order
to avoid “clientelising the recipient country” (Pettit 2014: 186). The idea underpinning
the republican approach is that liberty must have a material basis, and this basis requires
global rules which enable particular states to make their own determinations as to how
this material basis could work.
Third, the republican willingness to regulate economics in order to promote non-​
domination also pertains to pressing forms of global ecological degradation and harm
such as climate change. Republicans see these forms of environmental harm not just
as being an issue between humans and nature but as a case where people exercise the
capacity to dominate other people over time and space which can sharply restrict the
choices of future generations and people in other states. Coupled with this willingness
to democratically regulate society is the motivation to protect and value the environ-
ment in specific places and for particular political communities, rather than having an
abstract ethical concern for the environment. Republicans can be seen to be “vitally
concerned with the key challenge of sustainability—​how to extend the life of a spe-
cific historical community and its cherished and hard-​won values and practices, espe-
cially freedom” (Barry and Smith 2008: 138). Consequently, republican civic virtues
would see the political consequences of environmental issues within its conception of
liberty as requiring the extension of globalized sovereignty to regulate global environ-
mental issues and develop environmental international institutions. Pettit’s account of
contestatory democracy could operate to ensure that these institutions and regulations
are non-​arbitrary and effective (Slaughter 2008). This impulse is applicable to multi-​
generational issues like climate change, and to more specific questions of food security
and cross-​border pollution which have the capacity to dominate people.
636   Steven Slaughter

While republican scholars have advanced these institutional efforts to address prom-
inent global problems, activist efforts have also been evident. This chapter has argued
that an account of republican IPT needs to engage with both efforts, as developing
republican institutions is only part of the legacy of republicanism. This entails consid-
ering the actual and prospective role of activists with regards to security, economic, and
environmental issues. Indeed, Tully (2014: 85) indicates that these problems are tightly
interconnected by historical forms of political practice which are underpinned by unjust
forms of neglect and non-​recognition of peoples living at the margins of these political
practices. As a consequence, Tully (2014: 97) emphasizes the need for citizens to develop
forms of diverse citizenship in the form of specific cooperative and non-​violent civic
practices and activism within and across states, in order “to reform the institutions of
representative government and global governance from within” (see Chapter 21). While
this echoes the work of scholars who want to develop transnational forms of political
deliberation separate from the state (Dryzek 2006), the impulse generated by critical
republicanism is that addressing global problems requires considering the potential of
citizens and activists alongside the institutional and normative arguments of republican
scholars (Slaughter 2014). The claim here is not that diverse citizenship is a replacement
for republican citizenship, but rather that republican citizenship needs to be informed
by the various forms of diverse citizenship that deliberate and act on questions of dom-
ination from a wider range of perspectives. This is a crucial way to develop a political
context of deliberation and contestation which can support the effectiveness of repub-
lican states and efforts to develop globalized sovereignty.

Conclusion

Like many accounts of IPT, the republican account articulated here is an ambitious nor-
mative ideal and political programme. Republicanism requires elaborate institutional
arrangements at an interstate level and significant changes in the way people perceive
democracy, authority, and political responsibility. Indeed, the key feature of republic-
anism as a form of IPT is its focus on liberty and the view that power must be controlled
domestically and internationally by citizens to enable a republican conception of lib-
erty to exist. Despite some republican scholarship considering the possibility of a world
state, the republican conception of liberty is a counterpoint to cosmopolitan arguments
because it sees no tension in reinvigorating the state and developing stronger forms of
international institutions. The goal of Pettit’s account of globalized sovereignty is not to
create self-​interested and chauvinistic states but rather to develop wider circles of non-​
domination through the presence of both publicly responsive states and international
institutions. However, this chapter has also argued that the institutional account of
republicanism developed by Pettit needs to be informed by the civic account articulated
by more radical and critical scholarship which considers the influence of diverse forms
of transnational activism. A republican IPT informed by both accounts is relevant to a
 Republicanism and IPT   637

world that bears witness to various forms of domination and insecurity. A republica-
tion approach to IPT should take power seriously, and advocate a move towards a world
shaped by the universalism of non-​domination that is mediated and in a real sense con-
structed by citizens acting to avoid subjection.

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 Pa rt I X

F OR A N D AG A I N ST
R E A L P OL I T IC S A N D
I N T E R NAT IONA L
P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY
 ­c hapter 48

Realist Cha l l e ng e s

Duncan Bell

Realism casts a long shadow over international political theory. For many scholars,
especially those working on global justice, it is a pernicious foe that needs vanquishing
to secure political and theoretical progress. For its advocates, especially in International
Relations (IR), it serves as a blunt reminder of the limits of morality in international
affairs. However, realism is a shape-​shifting body of thought compatible with assorted
ethical and political orientations. Today it is produced in two disciplines, and there is
often little engagement between them. IR has long been its home. Whereas the “classical”
realism of Morgenthau, Herz, and Carr was explicit about its ethical commitments, the
bulk of recent IR scholarship has claimed the mantle of social scientific knowledge.
Intellectual historians have partially undercut this positivist self-​image, recovering the
complexity of classical realism, but this has not (yet) been matched by the development
of new realist ethico-​political theories.1 Contemporary realists, for example, have had
little to say about questions of international socioeconomic inequality and (re)distri-
bution. The state of the art in political theory is rather different. While realism was long
dismissed as a crude form of realpolitik—​if acknowledged at all—​recent years have wit-
nessed a surge of interest in developing realist theories (Rossi and Sleat 2014). This lit-
erature too has striking gaps. Above all, it fails to say much about international politics.
A central task for realists in the coming years will be to initiate constructive dialogues
across these disciplinary boundaries, and to produce a new body of realist international
political theorizing. This chapter discusses some challenges that realism poses, but also
challenges that realism itself faces.

The Feasibility Challenge

Despite their manifold differences, realists tend to converge on some core claims about
international politics.
642   Duncan Bell

a. Politics is a domain of human activity structured by power and coercion. The ever-​
present potential of conflict, including but not limited to lethal violence, accounts
for much of the intensity of political life.
b. Within political communities, power and the possibility of conflict can usually be
constrained or channelled by institutions, although they can never be eliminated.
In contrast, relations between political communities unfold largely in a context of
“anarchy.” The interstate system is shaped and reproduced by the asymmetric dis-
tribution of power, where power is defined in multidimensional terms (but espe-
cially military and economic capacity).
c. Governments adopt a hierarchy of priorities, invariably placing the “national
interest” above other considerations. At the core of the “national interest” lies
“national security.” Although ideas about the content of the national interest vary,
this ranking is found in all types of regime.
d. The most powerful states set the terms of global interaction and dominate inter-
national institutions. Relations between “great powers” are frequently marked by
fierce competition. Although such states voluntarily enter arrangements that con-
strain their behaviour, they will not adopt policies that fail to conform with their
interpretation of the national interest. Binding agreements and institutions—​
indeed, the very possibility of international cooperation—​are thus limited in
their scope and effects, at least where they are seen to challenge the interests of the
powerful.

Let us call this “analytical realism.” Adopting this account has significant implications
for achieving international reform.
Feasibility concerns enter the construction of a normative political theory at three
points: first, in elaborating and justifying action-​guiding principles; second, in design-
ing institutional schemes to implement those principles; and third, in identifying effi-
cacious strategies to help realize the principles and create the institutions (Gilabert
and Lawford-​Smith 2012). Analytical realism is relevant chiefly at the second and third
stages. It identifies significant constraints on the ability to create a just global order.
The normative literature on global poverty presents a good test case. Much of this
work, especially in an egalitarian cosmopolitan vein (see Chapter 9), argues that
wealthy states have extensive duties to redistribute wealth to poorer ones, and that
the basic norms and institutions of the system need fundamental reform. Political
theorists have displayed great ingenuity in devising policy proposals to ameliorate
crippling poverty—​Thomas Pogge’s (2002) “Global Resources Dividend” (GRD) is
but one of the best-​known examples. Yet state behaviour has changed little. The same
might be said of progress in democratizing international institutions (or replacing
them with more legitimate ones) (see Chapters 29 and 34). Configured in a deeply
hierarchical manner, the world remains scarred by poverty and violence. Analytical
realists have little difficulty in identifying the political dynamics that account for this
situation, and the factors blocking significant reform. Indeed, realists view many nor-
mative theories as impractical expressions of wishful thinking. This is most evident in
 Realist Challenges   643

plans that demand that the most powerful states cede key aspects of their sovereignty,
or that sovereignty itself be dissolved or replaced by new cosmopolitan structures.
While sovereignty is far from monolithic, and while major states do sometimes pool
control over elements of domestic and foreign policy decision-​making—​notably in
the European Union—​this is almost always where it is seen to be in the national inter-
est. States typically rank issues such as global poverty or inequality low on their list of
priorities.
We can distinguish between “hard” and “soft” constraints on political action. The
former include facts about what is “logically, conceptually, metaphysically, and nomo-
logically impossible,” and they set absolute limits on realizability. The latter are chiefly
economic, institutional, and cultural, and they are in principle changeable (Lawford-​
Smith 2013: 252, 255). Some soft constraints, though, are much “harder” than others,
insofar as they are deeply entrenched and sustained by power elites. The constraints
identified by analytical realism are typically at the harder end of the “soft” spectrum.
They are theoretically changeable, but (the realist insists) the probability of change
occurring in the foreseeable future is very low. We can distinguish two types of soft
constraint in relation to global distributive justice: economic and political. Because
citizens and government officials usually reject expensive policies that fail to appeal to
self-​interest, a distributive policy proposal is economically feasible in relation to finan-
cial burdens it would impose on the governments and/​or citizens of wealthy states. This
understanding of feasibility combines two distinct claims. The first refers to individual
motivation, identifying an unwillingness to bear high economic costs on behalf of alien
others. The second relates to the electoral dynamics of democratic societies: officials
intent on remaining in power will not countenance expensive policy proposals unless
they can effectively link them to the perceived self-​interest of a wide constituency. Many
cosmopolitan theorists are sensitive to both of these dimensions. Pogge (2002: 1, 205),
for example, argues that “modesty is important if the proposed institutional alternative
is to gain the support necessary to implement it and is to be able to sustain itself in the
world as we know it.” Economic conditionality, sometimes combined with accounts of
the motivational plausibility of liberal principles, often seems to exhaust feasibility ques-
tions for normative theorists.
Yet economic feasibility does not address key aspects of state motivation and com-
pliance. This is the domain of political feasibility. Realists argue that the norms and
institutions shaping international politics place significant constraints on the range of
realizable policy options. While an obvious point, it is nonetheless one that receives little
sustained attention in the global justice debates (see Chapter 8). Such constraints would
include the centrality of the national interest in the calculations of state leaders, the
overriding importance accorded to sovereignty, the daunting collective action problems
generated by great power competition, the routine prioritization of security over distri-
bution, and the subservience of international institutions to dominant states. The major
geopolitical context for the foreseeable future is the brute fact of American predomin-
ance and challenges to it from Russia and China. Any attempt to enact global reform will
have to deal with the fierce rivalry between them.
644   Duncan Bell

Both economic and political feasibility conditions need to be met if a proposal is to

have any chance of adoption. As such, Pogge’s GRD runs into trouble. The reason for
this lies not in the economic costs it would impose, but rather in the demand that states
cede a significant element of sovereign control over the financial proceeds resulting
from the extraction and sale of natural resources within their jurisdiction. For realists,
this has no hope of gaining support from the relevant agents in the key states. For moral
arguments to shift government policy, one of two conditions usually have to hold: (1) the
policy domain is exogenous to perceived core national interests; (2) the moral convic-
tions and public pressure actually conform to, or are aligned with, dominant perceptions
of the national interest. If this is right, it raises thorny ethical questions about the extent
to which reform proposals should be adjusted to the perceived national interests of the
most powerful states (Bell 2018).
As this brief sketch highlights, analytical realism presents a major challenge to the
feasibility of many ambitious proposals for global reform. It suggests, minimally, that
far more attention be paid to “non-​ideal” theorizing, and especially to identifying strat-
egies for reform in a world of great power competition. Yet it is important to recognize
the limited scope of this challenge. It only applies to the second and third stages of the-
ory construction. As such, it leaves untouched the project of “ideal theorizing” (see
Chapter 50), which chiefly falls into the first stage. Analytical realism is thus normatively
indeterminate. One could, in principle, accept its tenets and hold cosmopolitan egali-
tarian moral views. Likewise one could utilize analytical realist reasoning to underwrite
a conservative defence of the status quo. Relevant for addressing feasibility, analytical
realism does not represent a distinctive normative contribution to international polit-
ical theory.

Three Myths

A number of myths have inhibited dialogue between political theory and IR. Perhaps the
most pervasive is that realists deny space for moral reflection in international politics.
According to Charles Beitz, realists contend that “moral judgments have no place in dis-
cussions of international affairs or foreign policy” (1999: 15). Even some self-​proclaimed
realists accept this dispiriting picture. Thus Raymond Geuss charges Morgenthau and
his fellow travellers with denying that “moral considerations play a very considerable
role” in politics (2001: 55). Call this the myth of amorality. Yet realist theorizing encom-
passes a rich array of ethical arguments. Rather than characterizing it as a distinctive
normative theory, it is best understood negatively, as a family of positions that challenge
moralism, not morality.
Moralism, for Geuss, is a “kind of moralised preaching and an associated assumption
about the causal efficacy and cognitive significance of making moral judgements.” In
causal terms, the moralist places great weight on the ability of moral argumentation to
shape the world. In cognitive terms, the moralist believes that moral judgements should
 Realist Challenges   645

have a privileged status. Combined with these claims is the belief that “it is possible to
attain a kind of absoluteness, apodicticity and definite determinateness of judgement.”
Rejecting these assumptions, the realist is committed to “a certain kind of open-​
endedness, indeterminacy and context-​dependence or at any rate to agnosticism about
absolute and categorical judgement” (Geuss 2015: 4–​5). For Geuss, moralism is an ideal
type, but it is closely approximated in the philosophy of Plato and Kant, and it dominates
contemporary political philosophy, especially that indebted to Rawls. From this per-
spective, contemporary debates over global justice are hamstrung by their moralism.2
Realists stress contingency, context, fallibility, conflict, power, and the significant
limits (not irrelevance) of human reason and moral argumentation. Usually sceptical
about the value of “ideal” theorizing, political theory realists are largely united by the
methodological injunction that theorizing “should begin (in a justificatory rather than
a temporal sense) not with the explication of moral ideals (of justice, freedom, rights,
etc.), which are taken to settle the questions of value and principle in the political realm
but in an (typically interpretive) understanding of the practice of politics itself ” (Rossi
and Sleat 2014: 690). On this account, the defining feature of realism is “the attempt to
give autonomy to political normativity” (p. 690). This moves well beyond the empirical
claims of analytical realism (though it may align with them), and establishes a particular
way of understanding the role of political theorizing. Beyond that point of convergence,
realists differ in numerous ways.
For David Runciman, the dangers of moralism come in two basic forms. The first
is that it is well intentioned but politically inefficacious, because it distracts attention
away from the workings of power. It serves as a smokescreen. A stronger argument is
that moralism is deliberately cultivated by elites to give an idealistic gloss to their self-​
interested actions, thus becoming “a weapon in the hands of the privileged” (2016: 4).
Moralism of this kind is not confined to academic philosophical debate; it is a feature
of general political discourse. Thus Runciman (2006) argues that in pushing for war
against Iraq, Tony Blair was so convinced of his own moral probity that he was prepared
to overlook countervailing evidence and charge on, with predictably disastrous conse-
quences. The conviction politician thinks it is possible to transcend politics. “That belief
is dangerous because their response when they encounter the messy reality is to deny it,
or to ignore it, or to insist they can mould it to their higher purposes, which only makes
the mess worse” (Runciman 2016: 5). Yet Max Weber teaches a lesson that realists are
prone to forget, namely that the realist critique of moralism can lead them to fall prey
to self-​deception: “an insistence on the hold of power can morph into an inflexible real-
politik; an emphasis on the unavoidability of contingency can become a form of fatal-
ism; a focus on legitimacy can become a celebration of order at all costs” (Runciman
2016: 8). Realists, then, can succumb to the cognitive and ethical vices they warn against.
The other two myths can be dispatched more straightforwardly. The myth of state-​
centrism suggests that realism is necessarily committed to the normative priority of the
state, thus underwriting the “Westphalian” system. However, realist attitudes towards
the state are more complicated. Most realists have been state-​centric in the analyt-
ical sense: they regard states (or at least the most powerful of them) as the key actors
646   Duncan Bell

in world politics. This is an empirical claim. Many realists are also normatively state-​
centric, assigning the state a privileged ethical status in international affairs. But these
two positions are not necessarily connected. One can be committed to analytical real-
ism while rejecting the normative priority of the state. Even classical realists were open
to replacing the state with new institutional forms. Morgenthau once wrote: “Nothing
in the realist position militates against the assumption that the present division of the
political world into nation states will be replaced by units of a quite different character,
more in keeping with the technical potentialities and the moral requirements of the con-
temporary world” (1985: 10). During the 1950s he and Herz argued that the Promethean
nuclear power available to humanity rendered the main rationale for the state—​its abil-
ity to protect its citizens—​obsolete. This led both thinkers, albeit rather hesitantly, to
argue that the nation-​state model was outdated, and to suggest the necessity of a glo-
bal state. Realism, then, can challenge existing political forms in the name of human
flourishing. William Scheuerman (2011) has developed this point, identifying a strand
of “progressive realism” (including Carr, Morgenthau, and Herz) that offers conceptual
and normative resources for imagining cosmopolitan political forms. In particular, he
argues that realists insightfully stressed that cosmopolitan institutions require extensive
social foundations to function.
Despite the fact that realists are not necessarily committed to normative statism, most
political theory realists today say little about politics beyond the state (Bell 2017). But a
political theory that cannot address international relations is radically incomplete, and
fails to achieve the task of theorizing in a realist mode. Moreover, Runciman is right to
caution that realists must acknowledge forms of power—​especially those of capital and
technology—​that escape the rigid juridical framework of the state system. “Conceptions
of power and legitimacy in early twenty-first century [ . . . ] realism,” he writes, “continue
to have a distinctively twentieth-​century feel to them, in that they identify power and
legitimacy with the state and with the communicative and coercive instruments avail-
able to the state” (Runciman 2016: 2) To illuminate the real may require breaking away
from traditional forms of realist analysis. This is a major challenge for realist theorizing,
not least because many realists remain wedded to a view that the basic character of inter-
national politics is unchanging.
A third myth is that realism is inherently conservative. IR is plagued by many mis-
leading typologies. One of the most pernicious is the purported contrast between real-
ism and liberalism, which shapes pedagogy and writing alike.3 There is some truth to
this charge, insofar as many realists have been conservative and much post-​Waltzian
realist IR constitutes “a stodgy and rather self-​satisfied defence of the international sta-
tus quo” (Scheuerman 2011: vii). But this does not exhaust realist politics. While it is
arguable that all conservatives should be realists, realism is not necessarily conservative.
Most classical realists defended liberal political visions. As Herz once wrote, “there is no
essential opposition of realism and idealism” (1981: 202). The same is true of the recent
burst of realist writing in political theory: with only a handful of exceptions (e.g. Geuss
2008) they deploy realist insights to bolster liberalism. And realism, as we shall see, is
also compatible with more radical forms of politics. It is thus a mistake to view realism
 Realist Challenges   647

as a distinct substantive position in (international) political theory—​it does not present

a coherent, consistent worldview. Rather, realist commitments are compatible with vari-
ous ethico-​political stances.
These myths are not straightforwardly false. Some realists have evacuated morality
from international affairs; many are state-​centric; and realism dovetails neatly with con-
servatism. Instead, they present a monochrome image that bears little relation to the
more sophisticated expressions of realism found in political theory and IR.

The Liberal Realism of Fear

Navigating between conservative realism and ambitious visions of transformation, lib-

eral realists seek to create the conditions necessary for liberal values to flourish in a bru-
tally competitive world. They reject the former as too fatalistic, too wedded to the logic
of power and conflict; they reject the latter because such visions are insufficiently atten-
tive to the limits of moral argumentation, and because of the dangers of moralism.
Liberal realism takes different forms. Among the “classical” realists, Herz offered the
most explicit account of what he termed “realist liberalism.” A German émigré whose
thought was haunted by the terrors of mid-​twentieth-​century Europe, he was clear
about what was at stake. “The human cause will be lost if the liberal ideal is forgotten,
even as surely as it is lost if left to the utopian Political Idealist” (1951: v). He divided pol-
itical thinking into ideal types: political realism and political idealism. Realism acknow-
ledged “the implications for political life of those security and power factors which [ . . . ]
are inherent in human society,” while idealism fatally downplayed such factors. The most
important was the “security dilemma.” Since “politically active groups and individuals
are concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or anni-
hilated by other groups and individuals,” they seek to avoid this fate and consequently
“can never feel entirely secure in a world of competing units.” As such, they are com-
pelled to acquire “more and more power for themselves” (Herz 1951: 14). Exemplified
in the abject failure of the League of Nations, idealism was blind to such power dynam-
ics. But idealism was not identical to liberalism, and he argued that a “basically liberal
philosophy may be founded on the insights supplied by Realism, at the same time that
it is guided ethically by the standards of Idealism, namely concern for the individual
and the free development of human personality, and insistence on the universality of
these standards” (p. 227). Realism was about means, not ends. In international affairs
this entailed an emphasis on prudence, restraint, coexistence, humility, and incremen-
tal reform, as well as a fierce rejection of attempts to dominate the international system.
Like most realists, Herz’s political thought focused chiefly on questions of political vio-
lence and international organization, saying little about economic (re)distribution.
Liberal realism can be read as an instance of the “liberalism of fear.” The liberalism of
fear focuses on avoiding cruelty, not on specifying ideal conditions for human flourish-
ing. It does not “offer a summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive,
648   Duncan Bell

but it certainly does begin with a summum malum, which all of us know and would
avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear
itself ” (Shklar 1989: 29). Shaped by a historically informed scepticism about the capacity
of humans to (peacefully) transcend their circumstances, it aims instead to ameliorate
human suffering. Eschewing the “intense moralism” of much contemporary philoso-
phy, such liberals insist that political theorists attend first to the “only certainly universal
material of politics: power, powerlessness, fear, cruelty” (B. Williams 2005: 22, 59).
Neither Judit Shklar nor Bernard Williams wrote much about international polit-
ics. Instead, Stanley Hoffmann presented the most extensive articulation of the realist
“liberalism of fear” (1981; 1998). Conservative realists, he argued, conjure a world that
is descriptively inaccurate and normatively undesirable. They fail, that is, to recog-
nize that moral norms can motivate human action and help to sustain political order,
while defending a perverted form of politics by insisting on the absolute priority of the
“national interest.” Yet he also cautioned that many liberal visions were implausible,
even dangerously optimistic. While it remained the “only comprehensive and hopeful
vision of world affairs,” liberalism nevertheless “needs to be thoroughly reconstructed—​
and that task has not proceeded very far, either in its domestic or international dimen-
sions” (Hoffmann 1995: 177). Liberal internationalism needed reconstruction because
it was premised on a series of false beliefs about the possibility of international reform.
It was unrealistic in its understanding of international competition and conflict—​“the
plight of the liberal vision results from the fallacy of believing that all good things can
come together” (p. 167)—​and because it failed to offer a plausible account of transition,
expressing “a vision of harmony that remained rather vague about how to reach nir-
vana” (p. 164).
Methodologically, Hoffmann’s critique focused on questions of feasibility. Dismissive
of “ideal” theorizing—​it had “little relevance to reality” (1981: 2)—​he argued that lib-
erals needed to work within the existing constellation of arguments deployed by polit-
ical elites.

Willing the good after we have defined our idea of the good is simply not enough; if
we think that the game needs to be improved or needs to be transformed, we can do
this only by working through the actors themselves; exhortations are not sufficient.
We have a duty to show how the idea is compatible with or can be made compatible
with the actors’ self-​interest. (Hoffmann 1998: 63)

It was essential, he argued, to locate ethical concerns in context. “All ethical judgements
in politics,” he warned, “are historical judgements. They are [ . . . ] contextual or situ-
ational: they are not separable from the concrete circumstances, from the actual cases”
(1981: 27). Patient diplomacy, piecemeal reform, institutional cooperation, the pressure
of public opinion: all could help to improve the international system.
Hoffmann’s liberal realism was predicated on a distinction between domestic and
international politics. Presided over by a central government, domestic politics is more
amenable to realizing ethical principles. Indeed, he argued that the state was the most
appropriate site for fostering liberal values. Liberal cosmopolitans “step outside of the
 Realist Challenges   649

limits of traditional liberalism (which saw universal values of its creed realized in and
through a world of states, not a world state)” (1995: 170). International politics is an
anarchical order populated by societies expressing very different, and often antagonis-
tic, value systems. The liberalism of fear was a response to this structural constraint. It
“modestly aims at damage control—​but today that in itself is a revolutionary aspiration”
(Hoffmann 1998: 51–​3; Shklar 1989: 23). Like that of Herz, Hoffmann’s political thought
remains more suggestive than systematic. Rather than construct an overarching norma-
tive theory, he sketches various reformist proposals for how states (and other organiza-
tions) should act to limit interstate violence, uphold human rights, protect vulnerable
peoples, and address economic inequalities.
A more radical strand of realism rejects this moderate reformist account. Geuss is the
leading figure in contemporary radical realism, although other thinkers can also be seen
as arguing in the same vein, including Chantal Mouffe (2005: 90–​118). Radical realists are
not committed to defending existing institutions and ordering principles—​indeed, they
offer excoriating attacks on them. They challenge both the status quo and the ameliora-
tive reformism of liberal politics. Carr is the most famous IR radical realist. Developing
a heterodox Marxist perspective, he indicted the hypocrisy of the liberal world order
bequeathed by the British empire. Unlike Carr, contemporary radical realists (like the
liberals) have so far done little to flesh out an empirically rich picture of international
politics and its pathologies (Scheuerman 2013). Yet they offer a promising way of think-
ing about the power asymmetries and gross injustices of the international order.
One key difference between liberal and radical realisms concerns their attitude
towards utopia. While the liberalism of fear is “entirely nonutopian” (Shklar 1989: 26),
radical realists often embrace utopian thinking. Carr insisted that “[u]‌topia and reality
are [ . . . ] the two facets of political science. Sound political thought and sound political
life will be found where both have their place” (1956: 10). Geuss likewise advocates the
utopian possibilities of realism. He contrasts “being realistic” with being “a realist.” The
latter rejects moralism, the former is not a theoretical stance but rather a “policy, atti-
tude or disposition to behave in a certain way,” which typically involves accepting the
prevailing order. The person who is “realistic,” that is, “tries to cut his desires to fit the
cloth which his particular society has made available” (2015: 15). Commitment to the
former does not entail commitment to the latter. The realist need not be realistic. Geuss
distinguishes between two senses of utopianism:

The content-​based usage refers to the fact that the utopian project is outside the
bounds of what are conventionally thought to be politically or morally possible, or
that it focuses on human needs and desires that cannot be satisfied in the basic struc-
ture of society as it now exists. The more form-​based use describes utopian thinking
as presenting the advantages of a final state to be attained without giving an account
of how we are to get there. (2015: 18)

The latter sense is close to moralism, and it was this kind of utopianism that Marx (in
his critique of “utopian socialism”) and Carr (in his critique of liberal “idealism”) rightly
lambasted. Content-​based utopianism, however, is compatible with realism as a form of
650   Duncan Bell

radical critique. Realism of this kind need not be constrained by the feasibility worries
discussed earlier. Geussian utopianism is less concerned with fixed blueprints and ideal
societies than with developing “a more historically informed analysis of existing, but
changing, dissatisfactions and needs, and possible (contextually and historically spe-
cific) ways of satisfying them” (Geuss 2015: 18). Yet as with the liberalism of fear, this pos-
ition has yet to be developed systematically. This is the challenge facing both liberal and
radical realists in the coming years.

Conclusion

Realism, then, is an amorphous category employed in different ways across political

theory and IR. It lacks a determinate set of political commitments. While realists of all
stripes emphasize the centrality of power and conflict in politics, they specify the mean-
ing and interrelation of the concepts in contrasting ways, and draw radically different
political implications from them.

Notes
1. For bibliographical discussion, see Bell (2008; 2018). Partial exceptions include M. Williams
(2005), Lebow (2003), and Scheuerman (2011).
2. Less sceptical of Rawlsianism, Coady (2008) offers the most developed critique of moralism
(see also Bell 2010).
3. This opposition is less common in political theory than in IR: see Bell (2008) and Rossi and
Sleat (2014).

References
Beitz, C. (1999 [1979]). Political Theory and International Relations, rev. edn (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press).
Bell, D. (ed.) (2008). Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist
Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Bell, D. (2010). Political Realism and the Limits of Ethics. In D. Bell (ed.), Ethics and World
Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 93–​111.
Bell, D. (2017). Realism and International Relations. Philosophy Compass 12(2): 1–12.
Bell, D. (2018). Security and Poverty: Realism and Global Justice. In M. Sleat (ed.), Realist
Political Thought: Confronting Conflict, Motivation, and Morals in Institutions and Practices
(New York: Columbia University Press).
Coady, C. A. J. (2008). Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).
Geuss, R. (2001). History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Geuss, R. (2008). Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
 Realist Challenges   651

Geuss, R. (2015). Realism and the Relativity of Judgement. International Relations 29(1): 3–​22.
Gilabert, P., and H. Lawford-​Smith (2012). Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration.
Political Studies 60(4): 819–​20.
Herz, J. (1951). Political Realism and Political Idealism: A Study in Theories and Realities
(Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Herz, J. (1981). Political Realism Revisited: Response. International Studies Quarterly 25(2):
201–​3
Hoffmann, S. (1981). Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical
International Politics (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press).
Hoffmann, S. (1995). The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism. Foreign Affairs 98: 155–​77.
Hoffmann, S. (1998). World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post-​Cold War Era (Lanham,
Md.: Rowman and Littlefield).
Lawford-​Smith, H. (2013). Understanding Political Feasibility. Journal of Political Philosophy
21(3): 243–​59.
Lebow, R. N. (2003). The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Mouffe, C. (2005). On the Political (London: Routledge).
Rossi, E., and M. Sleat (2014). Realism in Normative Political Theory. Philosophy Compass
9(10): 689–​701.
Runciman, D. (2006). The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New
World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Runciman, D. (2016). Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet. Journal of
Political Philosophy 25(1): 3–​21.
Scheuerman, W. (2011) The Realist Case for Global Reform (Cambridge: Polity).
Scheuerman, W. (2013) The Realist Revival in Political Philosophy, Or: Why New is Not Always
Improved. International Politics 50(6): 798–​814.
Shklar, J. (1989). The Liberalism of Fear. In N. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Williams, B. (2005). In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument,
ed. G. Hawthorn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Williams, M. (2005). The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
 ­c hapter 49

T he Mar xist C ri t i qu e
of Internat i ona l
P olitical T h e ory

Andrew Davenport

The Marxist critique of IPT does not aim at the latter’s specific themes, with which
Marxism has generally not concerned itself, but rather at the field as a whole in that it
contests the validity of the terms in which International Political Theory (IPT) typic-
ally thinks international politics. This fundamental rejection derives from the fact that
Marxism sees the international space and understands its dynamics in an entirely dif-
ferent way from IPT. In order to reconstruct the Marxist critique of IPT, therefore, this
chapter first of all sets out, in very general terms, how IPT thinks international politics
and thus what its characteristic interests and categories are. These are then contrasted
with how Marxism has traditionally construed the dynamics of power in the inter-
national arena, and what it tends to see when it looks at international politics. From
there, the reasons why Marxism in IR does not speak the language of IPT and does not
engage in its debates become clear, and it can be seen how and to what extent Marxism
works as a critique of IPT’s conception of the international. The central concepts in
this critique are the central concepts of Marxism as such: capital and class. Marxism
developed its view of international relations from the basic terms of its theorization of
capitalist society, and these underpin its notion of “real politics,” both domestic and
international. This notion, traditionally committed to the “unity of theory and practice,”
is (in contrast to IPT) focused not on normative rule-​making and the elaboration of con-
ceptions of justice but on irreconcilable class conflict and fundamental social change.
The critique of IPT developed through capital and class can be said to work on two
levels, one of substance and one of form. At the first level, the Marxist argument is that
capital supplies the content of and is the driving force behind international politics in
the contemporary era, and is therefore central to any proper understanding of it. This
is the approach that Marxism in IR has generally concentrated upon developing. At
the second level, the argument is that capital is not a narrowly “economic” category but
 The Marxist Critique of IPT    653

should be understood as an encompassing sociocultural phenomenon, one that gener-

ates the forms through which liberal capitalist society understands itself, and that the
critique of capital is also a critique of those forms. This line is much less developed in
Marxist IR, but it can be argued that it would reach further into IPT and, if properly
elaborated, constitute a more powerful critique.

Viewing the International Space

IPT in general starts from the position that the international is a political space divided
among multiple sovereign states that are formally free, independent, and equal entities,
although it is well aware that there are enormous differences of power and capability
among these entities.1 While recognizing the centrality of these states to international
politics and the importance of the nation-​state as the fundamental political unit of the
contemporary world, IPT does not stop there; unlike some versions of Realism in IR, it
does not treat those states as so many “billiard balls,” such that the nature of the polit-
ical arrangements on the inside can be set aside for purposes of understanding external
politics. Instead, IPT acknowledges that alongside the states there is a plurality of actors
in the international sphere: from global corporations, through NGOs and civil society
groups, to religious associations, and on. Further, and again in contrast to some elem-
ents within Realism, IPT does not regard the international realm as necessarily conflict-​
ridden, such that states must be guided primarily by self-​interest, fear, and a basic desire
for survival. Rather, it sees the international as a complex, many-​levelled space of inter-
action, partly conflictual and partly cooperative. To focus solely upon power capabil-
ities is not enough because for IPT the international, more than just a system objectively
constituted by states that are in themselves separate and discrete entities, forms a kind of
society, or at the least a space of dynamic and developing multilateral engagement. It is
thus necessary to think about the relations between actors in the international sphere in
terms that reach beyond questions of brute power and interest.
From this derives the characteristic concern of IPT with normative questions, with
the elaboration of the ethical dimensions of international affairs, and with questions
of right and responsibility, authority and justice. IPT in its main currents is thus typ-
ically concerned with determining how far the kinds of relations between persons,
and between governments and citizens, that ideally characterize the interior political
space can be extended across borders; that is, how far political theory can become inter-
national political theory. As a general principle, the aim of IPT is to explore ways of
making the international into a more normatively regulated space and a more legally
ordered space, a space of determinate rights and duties of actors in relation to one
another. It is also concerned with exploring how far universal norms can be negoti-
ated among and adhered to by social and cultural traditions that possess sometimes
widely differing value systems. Hence the leading themes of IPT: human rights (see
Chapter 22), humanitarian interventions, responsibility to protect (see Chapter 25),
654   Andrew Davenport

Just War and the ethics of combat (see Chapter 17), global economic inequality, climate
change responsibilities (see Chapter 40), and so forth. There is of course enormous
debate and disagreement over these many complex issues, but the encompassing frame-
work within which the discussion takes place and the conception of the international
and of international politics that is assumed by it is broadly shared: agreements and
institutions can be established, rules and norms can be elaborated according to ethical
principles, which over time significantly shape and sometimes decisively change the
behaviour of international actors.
IPT, then, recognizes the international as a divided space, one where there is a con-
stitutive tension between the particularity and closure of the state internally, which
produces the identity of a political community, and the universality of the wider soci-
ety of the “global polity” within which each bounded state exists and upon which each
depends in a variety of ways. Certainly, IPT recognizes that the international is a space
traversed by power and often by violence (see Chapter 15), and that there are very con-
siderable differentials of wealth and opportunity within the global polity. But it also sees
the international as a societal space of negotiation among actors, one in which a con-
structive politics is both desirable and possible, even if the nature of the political envir-
onment in which the actors operate is in important respects not the same as that to be
found internal to a state. It is a space in which norms can be elaborated and in which
power can be regulated and made accountable—​and so ultimately a space in which the
pursuit of a conception of justice is a meaningful ambition.
This is where the crucial break between Marxism and IPT is to be located, and there-
fore where the root of the Marxist critique of IPT lies. Marxism also thematizes a con-
stitutive tension between particularity and universality in the international sphere.
However, it articulates this not as “international society, global polity” (Brown 2015) but
as a contradiction between the closed political entity of the liberal-​bourgeois nation-​
state and the progressively universalizing tendency of the world market within which
each state exists and must struggle for advantage. It also sees power and violence as
defining features of the international space; but its view of the nature and sources of
violence in the contemporary world, understood within a broader historical theory of
domination, displaces in its thinking about international relations the traditional cen-
trality of inter-​state conflict (hence Marxism’s indifference to e.g. the Just War trad-
ition). However, while it partly shares these perceptions with IPT, Marxism is altogether
less sanguine than the latter about the virtues, or even the point, of ethical critique, and
about the value and meaningfulness of elaborating norms and rules for governing the
international. Marxism shares with IPT the perception that the international is a space
occupied by multiple types of actor, not merely states as in traditional conceptions of
geopolitics. However, emphatically unlike IPT, it does not see the international as essen-
tially a shared societal space that makes discussion and negotiation possible. Nor, in
fact, does it understand the domestic political space in those terms either. For Marxism,
politics, both domestic and international, ultimately expresses, even if through many
layers of mediation, a conflict that necessarily arises out of the fundamental division that
is structurally intrinsic to modern society. No amount of norms and rules can eliminate
 The Marxist Critique of IPT    655

that division. In fact, ultimately they only serve to obscure it: the more they are elabor-
ated, the more the real truth is lost to sight.
The division in question is of course the class relation. In modern society, that relation
is between the bourgeois capitalist class and the proletariat. As Marxism understands
it, the division between these two classes is intrinsic to the social form of capital, which
is conceptualized as being shaped by the incessant and unlimited process of the self-​
valorization of value. The class division is recognized as irreconcilable within the con-
text of capitalist society; only a transformation in the form of the basic social relations
as a whole could overcome this structural antagonism through which capitalist society
works. It is by means of these two determinations, capital and class, that Marxism has
gone about theorizing international politics; and when the international is viewed in
this way, a very different conception is produced from that characteristic of IPT. In order
to understand how Marxist thinking works as a critique of IPT, it is therefore necessary
to grasp how the former understands capital and class and why it builds its conception
of the contemporary world, including international relations, around these concepts. It
is hardly possible here to summarize the totality of Marx’s thinking on these subjects—​
which was in any case unfinished and is much disputed—​let alone the range of subse-
quent Marxist interpretations. Nevertheless, a number of essential elements can be set
out that serve to indicate something of the scope of Marx’s conception of capital. These,
in turn, provide the context for then looking more closely at the major strands of Marxist
thinking about international politics and understanding why they take the approaches
that they do and how, collectively, they can be said to constitute a critique of IPT.

Capital and Class

Wrestling, in his early writings, with the legacy of Hegelian Idealism in the German
thought of his day, Marx came to the conclusion that the form of historical labour is
the principal determinant of society. The primary task confronting all societies—​one
that has to be fulfilled before anything further can be taken into account—​is to produce
and reproduce their own existence. If that process is not continually and successfully
undertaken, the society ceases to exist. This idea of what is primary led Marx to the fur-
ther conclusion that the most basic relations of any society are what he termed its “rela-
tions of production”: the social relations within which the process of the production
and reproduction of a society takes place. The totality of society’s capacity to reproduce
itself, both material-​technological and intellectual-​cognitive, representing the sum of its
capability of controlling nature, is what Marx referred to as the “forces of production.”
In the Marxian conception, this capability develops historically within a specific set of
relations of production until such time as the forces of production can no longer expand
within those relations. At that point, a historical transformation occurs by which new
relations of production that promote the continued development of society’s product-
ive capacity come into existence. Further, the relations of production have historically
656   Andrew Davenport

always taken the form of relations of domination—​class relations.2 From the origins of
the division of mental and manual labour, those who ruled have lived off the labour of
those who were subordinated. The form of the class relation develops along with the
development of the forces of production and the successive changes in the relations of
production. These are, very briefly, the essential determinants of the theory of history—​
what came to be canonized in the Marxist tradition as Historical Materialism—​within
which Marx elaborated his analysis of capitalist society.
In capitalist society the class relation is simplified to the greatest degree. Setting aside
owners of land, there are essentially just two major classes, as determined by relationship
to the means of production: the bourgeoisie, which owns the totality of society’s mater-
ial productive capacity, and the proletariat, which owns nothing and therefore has to sell
its labour power as a commodity to the bourgeoisie, by means of the wage relation, in
order to survive. Capitalist society is characterized by generalized exchange, and what
Marx demonstrates is how this continual process of all-​round exchange objectifies the
medium of exchange—​value, expressed in money—​and sets it free so that it takes on a
life of its own. The purpose of production in capitalist society is thus no longer the pro-
visioning of society with the material necessities of life but rather the accumulation of
value, abstract “wealth,” through the continual generation of surplus value in the pro-
duction process. A central part of Marx’s theory is his demonstration of the way in which
a surplus arises out of generalized exchange: the worker in the production process pro-
duces more value than is represented by the cost of reproduction of his own commodity,
his labour power, so that the product of the production process contains more value than
did the elements that went into it. The surplus produced by the worker is then appropri-
ated by the capitalist, who has bought all of the various elements used and is therefore
entitled to the final product. Capitalism, as a process typified by exchange, thus depends
both upon the class division and upon a highly mediated form of exploitation.
Finally for present purposes, capitalism should be understood as a uniquely totalizing
form of society—​for the first time in history actually a social system. Once the value-​
form comes into its own, and attains independence from any necessary material integu-
ment, it knows no limit. As Marx demonstrates, capital must continually expand or the
system falls into crisis. This conceptual limitlessness works in several dimensions. First,
the capitalist accumulation process is infinite, continually driven onwards by competi-
tion: there can never be enough wealth. Secondly, the logic of value, dissolving or incor-
porating non-​capitalist modes of social reproduction, ceaselessly extends the reach
of the commodity form, so that to an ever-​increasing degree all aspects of society are
drawn into the system. Capital is endlessly inventive in finding ways to make every part
of society functionally useful to the accumulation process. Thirdly, capital relentlessly
expands spatially. “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the con-
cept of capital itself,” Marx wrote in the Grundrisse in the late 1850s (1973: 408), and it is
surely part of the experience of neo-​liberalism in the early twenty-​first century to wit-
ness the truth of that statement. Now, in the contemporary world, nowhere is left out
and, by virtue of the telecommunications technology it has innovated, capital as finan-
cial flows traverses the entire world in an instant.
 The Marxist Critique of IPT    657

Marxism in IR

It is the understanding of capital and class as the defining, determinative features of

modern society that characterizes the various ways in which Marxist thought has gone
about conceptualizing international politics and global affairs generally. This leads
Marxism to see the international space in a radically different way from IPT.3 Even
while acknowledging inequalities of power and wealth in the international sphere, IPT
is nevertheless predicated on the belief that these can be rectified or at least ameliorated
through the promulgation of norms and values and the allocation of rights and respon-
sibilities. Marxism, by contrast, perceives power and domination to be much more
deeply rooted in the international space. For it, international politics is to be understood
on the one hand as an expression of the conflicts and contradictions of capitalist class
rule on a global scale, and on the other as the ongoing story of the subordination of
relatively non-​capitalist or “backward” parts of the world to the power of capital. It is
marked by conflict between major capitalist powers over dominance within the world
market; cooperation is between capitalists in order to establish and maintain power over
both the global proletariat and parts of the world consigned to subordinate positions
in the global economy. (Ideally, of course, Marxism classically envisaged an equal and
opposite form of international cooperation, that between the proletariats of the various
nations.) These two lines of thought characterize what can broadly be taken to be the
three distinctive schools of thought within IR Marxism.4 The interest here is not in the
strengths and weaknesses of these various schools and the details of their theorizing, but
rather in the general terms in which they conceptualize international politics and thus
how they can be understood as constituting a critique of IPT.
First, the theory of imperialism. Empire and imperialism have together always been
the signature motif of Marxist thinking about international politics, its characteristic
rhetoric. Imperialism theory goes back to debates, primarily between Central European
and Russian Marxists—​Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Bukharin—​in the period
before the First World War (see Brewer 1980 for a survey). It represents the first con-
certed effort within the Marxist tradition to link together an understanding of capitalist
development with a theory of international politics, Marx and Engels themselves having
generally treated the latter more as localized questions of political tactics and strategy
than problems of theory.5 In the theory of imperialism, capitalism was understood to
have entered a new phase—​monopoly capitalism—​that transformed the dynamics of
international politics. Where for many decades Britain had dominated as the first devel-
oped capitalist power, now there were a number of huge national centres of accumula-
tion, massive concentrations of capital, that vied with each other for shares of the world
market and for division of the areas that constituted the still non-​capitalist world. This
inter-​imperial rivalry, in an unregulated international space, would eventually lead to
inter-​capitalist war, which was how the First World War was traditionally understood
by Marxism (see e.g. Hobsbawm 1987). Imperialism theory remained the predominant
658   Andrew Davenport

mode of understanding international politics within Marxism throughout the twenti-

eth century, and as largely European inter-​imperial rivalry gave way first to the Cold
War duopoly and then to American monopoly, so the term “imperialism” came to refer
more and more to so-​called “US empire,” a perception given renewed life at the turn
of the millennium by the apparently aggressively militaristic and assertively unilat-
eral foreign policy posture of the George W. Bush administration, which provoked a
rethinking and updating of theories of empire (Callinicos 2009; Harvey 2003; Panitch
and Gindin 2012).
The second broadly Marxist school is World Systems Theory.6 This has its origins
in the 1960s, in the context of Dependency Theory and the attempt to understand the
problem of the “Third World” in opposition to the then dominant liberal Modernization
Theory. Grounding itself on the historical binary it posits of “world empires” and “world
systems,” World Systems Theory, in contrast to imperialism theory, represented an
attempt to break out of methodological nationalism and to conceptualize the world sys-
tem that capital has produced as an integral whole (Wallerstein 1991). To this extent, it
has generally given primacy to the world market rather than to the inter-​state system. It
conceptualized the former through a fundamental threefold, primarily economic, div-
ision: core, semi-​periphery, and periphery. The core is the major, developed capitalist
powers; the semi-​periphery some relatively small buffer zones; and the periphery vir-
tually everywhere else, the vast areas of the world once subjected to direct or indirect
imperial domination by the European capitalist empires. In understanding the histor-
ical working of the capitalist global economy, World Systems Theory has been primarily
interested in how, through the recycling of value between the areas into which the global
system is divided, the dominance of the core and the subordination of the periphery are
maintained.
Finally, there is the school of Neo-​Gramscian theory in Marxist IR, which came to
prominence in the early 1980s in response to the turbulence in the international system
in the previous decade and what seemed, at the time, to be a decline in US preponder-
ance.7 Its essential question was how to conceptualize the long-​term stability of the cap-
italist world order, and, in particular, how to understand the way in which the various
capitalist powers had, as a whole, been brought under the leadership of the USA. Where
once inter-​imperial rivalry was thought to explain relations between capitalist states,
after the Second World War the former rivals to an increasing extent came to acquiesce
in the dominance of one state, the US, willingly following its leadership in most aspects
of the construction of international order. In search of an explanation for this phe-
nomenon, attention was turned to the thinking of the prewar Italian Marxist, Antonio
Gramsci, and his reflections both on the relation between the capitalist state and civil
society and on how a dominant class wins the support of subordinate classes to its pro-
ject of leadership (Gramsci 1971). The panoply of Gramscian concepts—​principally: his-
torical bloc, passive revolution, and above all hegemony—​were imported from the
national context in which Gramsci developed them into the international realm, and
were used to explore the various dimensions of US leadership, or hegemony, amid wider
 The Marxist Critique of IPT    659

debates both within Marxism and more generally about whether or not, within a chan-
ging global economy, US dominance was on the wane.
Even from this brief sketch it is evident that Marxism by no means shares IPT’s view
of the international realm. For Marxism, it is capitalism that is in every respect the fun-
damental category, as the force that has created the modern world. As a result, Marxism
understands the international as a space determined by the power of capital, whether
that be in the form of the dominance of the collective but nationally divided global cap-
italist class, or of capitalist nation-​states, or of capital itself, in the abstract, through the
workings of the world economy. Marxism’s critique of IPT, then, would be that even
when the latter addresses issues such as global economic inequality, it does not com-
prehend the depth and extent of the power of capital: it remains a distributional critique
(“social justice”) within the terms of bourgeois capitalist society, rather than a critique
of the social relations of capital as such. For Marxism, to the extent that IPT does not
recognize this and does not properly grasp capital theoretically, it does not understand
the force that more than any other shapes the international realm. For Marxism, IPT’s
primary failing is thus that it does not properly appreciate Marx’s indispensable percep-
tion: that “capital is a larger, more creative, more nearly total form of power than any-
thing else in human history” (Brown 2005: 68).

Extending the Critique?

Thus far, the Marxist critique of IPT is largely indirect: it is a question of two differ-
ent ways of looking at the international space and understanding its dynamics, with
Marxism implying that IPT does not grasp the meaning of capital and so misconstrues
its significance. To this extent, the Marxist critique remains external to IPT rather than
immanent to it. However, perhaps it would be possible for Marxism to reach further
into IPT and to develop its critique not just at the level of content but at that of form as
well. In its mainstream, IPT can be considered an essentially liberal discourse. Anthony
Lang observes that “the general presumptions of statehood, international human rights,
international economics and war revolve around themes that arose in 19th-​century lib-
eral thought. International law, as the language through which international affairs
take place, best expresses this latent liberalism” (Lang 2015: 7). The typical terms of the
IPT discourse are drawn from this liberal language: rights and responsibilities, ethics
and norms, equality and inequality, pluralism, legality, global citizenship, and so forth.
Thus IPT, both in its conceptualization of the challenges and difficulties of international
affairs and in its ideas of how to address and resolve them, exists within an essentially
liberal experience of the world. As such, it ought not to be beyond the critical reach of
Marxism. For the latter is, in its ambitions, much more than an economic theory. It is,
rather, a critique of liberal bourgeois society as a whole, in all its manifestations, one
from which none of the characteristic categories of liberal thought should be immune
(Sayer 1985). Marx’s analysis of bourgeois society began with an engagement with liberal
660   Andrew Davenport

political theory, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and there are at least significant elements of
a radical critique of the liberal political subject in one of the important occasional texts
from the 1840s, “On the Jewish Question,” in which Marx denounces the form of polit-
ical emancipation typical of the liberal subject as limited and incomplete, still essentially
a version of unfreedom compared to the fully “human emancipation” that he posits in
opposition to it (Marx 1992). Part of the ambitious but often still only embryonic cri-
tique of capitalist society that Marx launches in his early writings, before the turn to
political economy, is thus the critique of the liberal conception of the human being as a
rights-​bearing subject, and of its modern political status as a citizen.
This line of critique is by no means entirely lost when Marx comes to devote his full
theoretical attention to the question of capital. In many respects, in fact, it is deepened in
the analysis; but the change of conceptual language means that the far-​reaching impli-
cations of the critique of capital often remain latent within the text and are not explicitly
drawn out. Take, for example, one of the crucial moments in the argument of volume 1
of Capital, the point at which Marx reaches the limits of his consideration of the sphere
of simple circulation and is confronted with the conundrum of how a surplus can arise
in a system characterized by the constant equalization that is implied in generalized
exchange. The theoretical crux is that the surplus must arise both through circulation
and not through circulation (Marx 1990: 268–​9). The sphere of circulation is, in Marx’s
famous satirical words,

a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality,
Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commod-
ity [ . . . ] are determined only by their own free will. [ . . . ] Equality because each
enters into relations with the other as with a simple owner of commodities and they
exchange equivalent with equivalent. Property because each disposes only of what
is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage. (Marx
1990: 280)

However, once the wage contract is concluded, equality gives way to hierarchy, the capit-
alist striding confidently out in front and the worker following on reluctantly behind, as
they leave the sphere of circulation and descend together into the abode of production,
where the worker will be put to labour and the capitalist will reap the rewards.
The critical implications of this important moment of transition are extensive. It is a
presupposition of Marx’s argument in Capital that the system works as it says it does.
That is, that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent throughout. The rules and norms
of commodity exchange are scrupulously adhered to: nobody cheats, nobody robs any-
body else by taking more than they are entitled to, everyone’s rights and responsibilities
are acknowledged. This is because Marx was aware that the systematic production of
a surplus could not be explained by unequal exchange: if X illicitly appropriates some
of what is in fact owed to Y, then that only redistributes the surplus; it does not explain
how it arises in the first place. What Marx shows is that by virtue of the class relation and
the status of labour power as a commodity, the laws of equality, of equivalent exchange,
 The Marxist Critique of IPT    661

intrinsic to capitalist society necessarily become through their own development laws of
appropriation. The system simultaneously fulfils its standards of equality and justice and
violates them. The transition from the sphere of circulation to the abode of production is
a dramatic moment in the dialectic of essence and appearance in Capital. Circulation is
the sphere of appearance, where all the actors are free and equal and there is no coercion
involved. However, the sphere of circulation is not self-​sustaining because no continual
surplus can arise within it. It is therefore necessarily reliant on production, where the
capitalist has absolute power over the worker and appropriates the totality of what the
latter produces. It is thus production that is the essence that appears in circulation; but it
can only appear there in a form other than, in fact the opposite of, itself.
Although it is not explicitly elaborated as such within Marx’s text, this implies a cri-
tique of the liberal subject and of its values of justice and equality as they are constituted
and expressed through the norms of the sphere of circulation. What Marx demonstrates
in Capital is that ideally bourgeois society operates exactly according to its own, much-​
trumpeted notions of freedom and fairness, but that precisely in doing so it rests upon
and perpetuates class division. It is not merely that justice conflicts with injustice; rather,
justice contains injustice within itself, inherently so, such that they cannot be separated
from each other. This also complicates the normative dimension (to use liberal lan-
guage) of Marx’s theory. For again, Marx shows that according to the logic of capital, of
free and fair exchange, the worker receives exactly what he should receive and what he
is entitled to, the value of his labour power as represented in the wage.8 What this means
is that Marx’s critique of capital is far from being a distributional critique. It is instead a
critique of the form of wealth that is produced in capitalism—​value—​and of the social
relations of production as a whole that necessitate it (Postone 1993). As such, it is also an
immanent critique of liberal bourgeois conceptions of justice.

Conclusion

That the elements in Marx’s thought from which a sustained critical account of the
liberal subject and liberal notions of right, equity and justice might be derived have
not been developed by Marxism in IR as a critique of the mainstream of IPT is per-
haps a consequence of the still unsettled nature of the status of the international within
Marxism. As the latter has consolidated as a subfield in IR, so it has gradually come to
confront the basic problematic of the discipline, the international as such, and to pon-
der its relation to Marx’s thought, historical materialism, and the theory of capital. The
schools of Marxist thought within IR surveyed above are theories of international rela-
tions and the dynamics of international politics, but they are not theories of the inter-
national itself. The depth and ambition of Marx’s theory, starting from what it takes to
be the fundamental social relations of production, would seem to demand that no social
determination should ultimately be extraneous to it, outside the reach of the theory. But
that is essentially the problem that the international currently poses to Marxist thought
662   Andrew Davenport

in IR: how can the existence of the fragmented global political space of the states system
be explained from within the perspective of Marxist thought?
Among those who have addressed this question, no consensus has been established,
some denying any conceptual relation between capital and the international (Teschke
2003), others affirming a necessary connection but on functional rather than conceptual
grounds (Wood 2003). Relatedly, an important body of work has sought to ground the
international sociologically by elaborating the originally Trotskyan idea of uneven and
combined development (Rosenberg 2013). The significance of this deficit in the present
context is that if the international is not comprehended as intrinsic to the world of capital,
then the Marxist critique of IPT remains what it has so far been, an external one, by
implication rather than direct engagement: they are simply two different and compet-
ing ways of looking at a given object. If, however, the international was to be under-
stood as itself a determination of the capitalist mode of production, then the critique
could become a more powerful and compelling internal one, comprehending IPT as the
necessary, and necessarily limited, understanding that the liberal world has of its inter-
national dimension—​an understanding at the level of appearance rather than essence.

Notes
1. For recent general introductions to the field of IPT, see Brown (2015) and Lang (2015).
2. Thus the famous opening sentence of part 1 of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 2002: 219).
3. At least from its mainstream. On its “left wing,” some within IPT have positioned them-
selves in proximity to the Marxist understanding of deep, objective structures of power and
exploitation. See e.g. the work of Andrew Linklater on emancipation and harm.
4. For a more extensive review of the different schools of Marxism in IR, see Teschke (2008).
5. In one of his plans for Capital, in six volumes, Marx indicated that he intended to write a
volume on international relations. But, like much of Capital, this was destined to remain no
more than a plan.
6. Representative texts of this broad-​ranging school include Arrighi (1994), Chase-​Dunn
(1989), and, most importantly, Wallerstein (1974–​89).
7. The founding text for IR is Cox (1983). See further Cox (1987), Gill (1994), and Morton
(2007).
8. On the complexity of the category of exploitation in Marx, see Arthur (2004: ch. 3).

References
Arrighi, G. (1994). The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
(London: Verso).
Arthur, C. J. (2004). The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Leiden: Brill).
Brewer, A. (1980). Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul).
Brown, C. (2015). International Society, Global Polity (London: Sage).
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Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press).
Callinicos, A. (2009). Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity).
Chase-​Dunn, C. (1989). Global Formation: Structures of the World-​Economy (Oxford: Blackwell).
Cox, R. (1983). Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 12(2): 162–​75.
Cox, R. (1987). Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History
(New York: Columbia University Press).
Gill, S. (ed.) (1994). Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart).
Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Hobsbawm, E. (1987). The Age of Empire, 1875–​1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Lang, A. F., Jr (2015). International Political Theory: An Introduction (London: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London:
Penguin).
Marx, K. (1990). Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin).
Marx, K. (1992). Early Writings (London: Penguin).
Marx, K., and F. Engels (2002). The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin).
Morton, A. D. (2007). Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global
Political Economy (London: Pluto Press).
Panitch, L., and S. Gindin (2012). The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of
American Empire (London: Verso).
Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Rosenberg, J. (2013). Anarchy in the Mirror of Uneven and Combined Development.
International Politics 50(2): 183–​230.
Sayer, D. (1985). The Critique of Politics and Political Economy: Capitalism, Communism and
the State in Marx’s Writings of the mid-​1840s. Sociological Review 33(2): 221–​53.
Teschke, B. (2003). The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International
Relations (London: Verso).
Teschke, B. (2008). Marxism and International Relations. In C. Reus-​Smit and D. Snidal (eds),
The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch. 9.
Wallerstein, I. (1974–​89). The Modern World System, vols 1–​3 (New York: Academic Press).
Wallerstein, I. (1991). Societal Development, or Development of the World-​ System? In
Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-​Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity),
64–​79.
Wood, E. (2003). Empire of Capital (London: Verso).
 ­c hapter 50

The Case for

Ideal T h e ory

Laura Valentini

In recent years, political theorists have devoted increasing attention to questions of

methodology. The debate on so-​called “ideal vs non-​ideal theory” is at the heart of this
methodological turn, and prominently features controversies about international pol-
itical morality. Specifically, some of the most ambitious views in International Political
Theory (IPT) are routinely criticized for being too “ideal” or “utopian.” Targets of these
criticisms include cosmopolitan theories defending global distributive equality (see
Chapter 9), theories of global democracy (see Chapter 29), and so-​called “revisionist”
just war theory (see Chapter 17).
My aim in this chapter is to evaluate whether, and if so under what conditions, the
critique of excessive idealism succeeds. I argue that success is rare. I proceed as fol-
lows. In the second section, I clarify terminology and distinguish between two rea-
sons why a theory may be labelled “ideal”: either because it contains idealizations
or because it is insensitive to feasibility constraints. In the third section, I address
objections raised against international political theories that contain idealizations.
I show that whether the presence of idealizations invalidates a given theory depends
on the role those idealizations play within the theory as a whole. In the fourth sec-
tion, I address objections raised against theories that (allegedly) fail to take sufficient
account of feasibility constraints (see Chapter 48). I argue that those objections only
threaten normative theories that claim to deliver practically efficacious guidance.
Purely evaluative theories, and normative theories that do not aspire to practical
efficacy, are unaffected by this “feasibility” critique. I thus conclude, in the fifth sec-
tion, that there is nothing wrong with ideal theorizing as such, but only with certain
misuses of it. Throughout, I illustrate these broader methodological points—​which
I have partly defended elsewhere1—​by reference to examples drawn from some of the
most prominent areas of IPT: global justice, global democratic theory, and just war
theory.
 The Case for Ideal Theory    665

What Is an Ideal Theory?

One often hears political theorists refer to “ideal” and “non-​ideal” theory. Yet what the
labels “ideal” and “non-​ideal” stand for is far from clear (for overviews, see Stemplowska
2008; Valentini 2012; Stemplowska and Swift 2012). What is more, the very notion of “a
theory” is ubiquitously, yet loosely, invoked.
First, by “a theory” I mean a set of propositions, entailed by principles, that play a
given functional role in an agent’s understanding of reality (List and Valentini 2016: 536–​
7). Depending on the relevant functional role, we can distinguish between positive and
normative/​evaluative theories. A theory is normative when its propositions include
deontic operators (such as “ought,” “must,” “may”), and it is evaluative when its proposi-
tions include evaluative predicates (such as “good,” “bad,” “just,” “unjust”). Otherwise,
it is positive. Biological and physical theories—​e.g. Darwin’s theory of evolution or
Einstein’s theory of relativity—​are positive. Theories of international justice and of the
just war, by contrast, belong to the normative or evaluative domain.
In this contribution, I focus on normative and/​or evaluative theories that may be
described as “ideal.” The distinction between ideal and non-​ideal theory was first intro-
duced by John Rawls (1999a: 8, 215; cf. Simmons 2010). An ideal theory, according to
Rawls’s definition, is a theory designed assuming “full compliance”—​i.e. all agents act
as they ought to—​and “favourable conditions”—​i.e. circumstances are such that indi-
viduals’ basic rights and needs can be met (Rawls 1999a: 475–​6). A non-​ideal theory, by
contrast, is a theory characterized by partial compliance, and/​or the lack of favourable
conditions. That said, in the recent literature, the notion of ideal theory has attracted
several rather broader understandings. Two of them, which I discuss below, are particu-
larly prominent.
On one understanding, normative and/​or evaluative theories are “ideal” to the extent
that they involve idealizations. Idealizations, in Onora O’Neill’s (1996: 41) well-​known
characterization, are falsities introduced for theoretical purposes. Full compliance and
favourable conditions are just two examples of idealization: it is plainly false that, in our
world, everyone complies with the demands of justice, and that favourable conditions
always obtain. Other idealizations include statements such as: “there is no disagreement
about justice across different societies”; “soldiers in war face no uncertainty”; “society is
a closed system”; or “individuals are always altruistically motivated.”
A second understanding of ideal theory has developed in connection with debates
about so-​called feasibility constraints (e.g. Räikkä 1998; Gilabert and Lawford-​Smith
2012; Lawford-​Smith 2013; Wiens 2015b). From this perspective, the more insensitive to
feasibility constraints a theory is, the greater its level of idealism. Feasibility constraints
are those physical, biological, political, psychological, and economic facts that make the
prescriptions of a normative theory hard, if not impossible, to realize. Theories of inter-
national political morality that prescribe considerable global redistribution, demand
global democratic participation, or make the permissibility of killing in war dependent
666   Laura Valentini

on individuals’ moral liability are often regarded as “ideal” in this sense—​since their
prescriptions appear to be either impossible or at any rate extremely hard to fulfil.
For the sake of completeness, I should mention that there is also a third understand-
ing of ideal theory in the current literature. This is ideal theory understood as offer-
ing an endpoint towards which we should aspire. This understanding of ideal theory is
contrasted with transitional theories of justice (see Chapter 12), detailing how to make
progress justice-​wise, without necessarily achieving the ideal (Sen 2009; Wiens 2015a;
2012). Due to space constraints, I set this third understanding aside in the present chap-
ter, and focus on the previous two.
It has become quite common to object to (international) political theories by virtue
of their being ideal in either of the two senses I focus on. Behind these critiques stands
the following general concern. A key aim of (international) political theory is to help
us address pressing normative questions that arise in today’s international realm: wars,
refugee crises, global poverty, and much else. Ideal theories, however, are doomed to
fail in this respect. At best, they are useless; at worst, their application to current (inter-
national) affairs will deliver bad outcomes (see e.g. Mills 2005; Farrelly 2007; McCarthy
2004; Sen 2009; Wiens 2015a; Miller 2013; cf. Valentini 2009).2
In what follows, I examine the validity of this critique in relation to (i) theories of
international political morality that contain idealizations and (ii) theories that disregard
feasibility constraints.

Responding to the Charge

of Idealization

Several normative/​evaluative theories of international politics contain idealizations.

Here I offer three prominent examples.

• Cosmopolitan theories of global distributive justice that recommend applying the

outcome of Rawls’s original-​position thought experiment to the world at large (see
e.g. Beitz 1999; Pogge 1989). To the extent that Rawls’s thought-​experiment contains
idealizations (not only about full compliance and favourable conditions, but also in
the characterizations of the parties behind the veil of ignorance), those idealiza-
tions are carried forward in cosmopolitan theories that globalize its conclusions.
• Rawls’s statist theory of international justice, outlined in The Law of Peoples, contains
several idealizations, including its assumption that societies are relatively inde-
pendent units, distinguished into five categories: liberal, decent, burdened, out-
law states, and benevolent absolutisms (Rawls 1999b). The theory, in other words,
assumes away much of the complexity of contemporary international politics.
• Revisionist theories of the just war, which often assume away some of the most phys-
ically and psychologically debilitating circumstances of war (see e.g. McMahan
2009; Fabre 2012; Frowe 2014).
 The Case for Ideal Theory    667

Does the fact that these theories contain idealizations suffice to put their tenability into
question? Critics of ideal theory as idealized theory would answer in the affirmative.
This unconditional affirmative answer is unwarranted. Whether the presence of ideal-
izations affects the plausibility of a normative theory, I suggest, depends on the level at
which the idealizations are introduced.
As Christian List and I have argued elsewhere, one should distinguish three levels
at which idealizations may be encountered in the construction of a normative theory.
First, the idealizations might be contained in the theory itself, namely in the body of pro-
positions entailed by its principles. Second, the idealizations might be contained in the
conditions of applicability of the theory, namely in the set of circumstances and agents
to which the theory is meant to apply. Third, idealizations may be contained in the argu-
ments or evidence offered in support of a given theory (List and Valentini 2016: 545–​6).
Which kinds of idealizations are dangerous?
While the presence of idealizations within the theory itself is problematic, this is for
reasons other than those cited by critics of idealization. To say that a theory contains
idealizations is to say that some of its propositions are false in relation to their subject
matter. If a theory of international political morality is idealized in this first sense, all
this means is that its prescriptions are incorrect. For instance, if the theory prescribes
global socioeconomic redistribution, but this is not in fact what global justice requires,
then the theory is “idealized”: it contains a false statement about international justice.
What critics of idealized theorizing typically have in mind are idealizations that fea-
ture at the level either of the arguments offered in support of a normative theory or of
the conditions of applicability of the theory, which I discuss in turn. An example of the
former is offered by cosmopolitan theories of justice: both (i) “relational” theories that
globalize the outcome of Rawls’s original position on the ground that there exists a “glo-
bal basic structure of society” (e.g. Beitz 1999; Pogge 1989) and (ii) “non-​relational”
theories that advocate global equality independently of the existence of a global basic
structure or particular global relationships (e.g. Caney 2005; for the labels “relational”
and “non-​relational,” see Sangiovanni 2007).
As mentioned earlier, “globalizing” Rawls’s original position involves importing all
of the idealizations that characterize it. These include not only the assumptions of full
compliance and favourable conditions, but also a given description of the “contractors”
who are to choose the relevant principles of justice. Famously, they are prevented from
knowing facts about themselves—​including their talents, abilities, and social class—​by
being placed under a “veil of ignorance.” These assumptions are clearly counterfactual:
they involve falsities about the world in which we live. But does the fact that they figure
in the argument supporting Rawls’s theory—​i.e. the fact that Rawls’s principles would
be chosen in the original position—​necessarily imply that the theory itself is some-
how undermined? It is far from clear why it should (List and Valentini 2016: 545–​6; cf.
Lawford-​Smith 2010).
The original position is meant to model circumstances of fairness, such that its out-
put may also be regarded as fair. One may of course object to the original position on
the grounds that its modelling of fairness is unconvincing. But this would be a substan-
tive objection, not a methodological one having to do with idealization. Consider the
668   Laura Valentini

following analogy. When considering whether the grade we have given a student whose
identity we know is fair, we may want to ask whether we would have given the same
grade had we not known the student’s identity. To be sure, this is a counterfactual claim,
yet its counterfactual nature, per se, does not appear to invalidate its heuristic value.
Perhaps we can think of a better counterfactual, say one in which not only the identity
of the paper’s author is concealed but also the handwriting of the author is easier to read.
Poor handwriting may in fact negatively influence examiners. Still, the use of idealiza-
tions in the evidence/​arguments used in support of a theory is not per se problematic.
Similar conclusions may be drawn with respect to even starker instances of uses of
idealizations in the “evidence” supporting a theory. Consider the counterfactuals mar-
shalled by “non-​relational cosmopolitans” in support of the view that justice demands
equality between individuals independently of whether they share a Rawlsian basic
structure, or other kinds of special relationships. For example, we may be invited to
imagine individuals in completely separate plots of land, who do not know each other,
and who are differently off: one has plenty, the other very little, and neither deserves his
or her fortune or misfortune. We are then asked whether this deeply unequal distribu-
tion of resource strikes us as unjust. A positive answer to this question is evidence in
support of non-​relational cosmopolitanism. To be sure, the far-​fetched scenario involv-
ing two individuals is far from an accurate description of the world today. Yet its point
is not to offer such a description, but only to prove that our convictions about egalitar-
ian justice do not depend on the presence of a basic structure or special relationships.
And to do so, precisely those relationships have to be (counterfactually) assumed away.
This is a familiar technique in causal reasoning. To establish that our headache does not
depend on chocolate consumption, we stop eating chocolate and see whether the head-
ache persists. Similarly, to prove that (our thinking about) justice does not depend on
special relationships, we assume them away, and test whether our intuitions persist in
such counterfactual—​relationship-​free—​scenarios.
The foregoing discussion has shown that the use of idealizations in the arguments
or evidence offered in support of a normative theory is not per se a source of concern.
Resort to idealization as such does not make an argument a bad one—​though of course
many arguments can contain idealizations and also be weak or unsuccessful, for reasons
that are independent of the mere fact that they feature those idealizations.
Let me finally turn to idealization at the level of the conditions of application of a nor-
mative theory. By “conditions of application,” I mean the circumstances under which its
prescriptions hold. For example, consider the conditional prescription: “One ought to
abide by the law if most of one’s fellow citizens comply with it.” The duty to abide by the
law, here, applies in circumstances of near-​full compliance. But the above conditional
prescription tells us nothing about what we should do when very few comply with the
law.
Several theories of international political morality are characterized by the presence
of idealizations at the level of their conditions of application. Rawls’s “law of peoples”
and contemporary revisionist theories of the just war are two prominent examples.
Rawls’s principles of international justice are designed assuming a world populated
 The Case for Ideal Theory    669

by societies that are fairly self-​contained, and independent of each other. This is also
a world in which societies can be easily classified in the following mutually exclusive
categories: well-​ordered peoples, burdened/​less-​developed societies, benevolent abso-
lutisms, and rogue regimes. In a world populated by these types of societies, Rawls’s
principles apply.
It is of course almost superfluous to say that today’s world is far from the simplified one
Rawls envisages (Shue 2002). Poor societies can also be rogue regimes. Liberal societies
are often implicated in the institutional deficits of developing countries. Furthermore,
societies are not relatively independent, but deeply interconnected through the global
economy (Pogge 2001). What this means is that the prescriptions contained in Rawls’s
eight principles may well not apply to, or be appropriate for, the world in which we live.
Strictly speaking, they are silent about it. If we want the theory to be able to guide our
action in real-​world circumstances, this form of idealization is of course problematic.
That is, conditional on the aim of the theory being real-​world action guidance, idealiza-
tions in its conditions of application render the theory highly likely to be unsuccessful:
we have very little reason to believe that principles that are appropriate for Rawls’s sim-
plified world also work for ours. Though, if the aim of the theory is not to guide action in
real-​world circumstances, but simply to outline a number of conditional prescriptions
taking the form “In such and such circumstances, one ought to perform such and such
actions,” then the presence of idealizations in the theory’s conditions of application is
not per se problematic.
In the case of Rawls’s theory of international justice, it seems interpretively plausible
to suggest that The Law of Peoples is indeed meant to apply to existing circumstances—​
indeed, it is meant to guide the foreign policy of liberal societies. To that extent, the
presence of idealizations in its conditions of application justifiably raises concerns. The
charge of problematic idealization is warranted in this case (Valentini 2009).
Let me now turn to just war theory. Key tenets of just war theory—​especially of jus in
bello, as famously discussed by Michael Walzer (1977)—​are the moral equality of com-
batants and non-​combatant immunity. The former corresponds to the idea that combat-
ants enjoy the same moral status independently of whether they are fighting on the “just
side”; the latter to the idea that deliberately targeting non-​combatants is impermissible.
Recently, the Walzerian—​“orthodox”—​paradigm has been challenged by so-​called
“revisionist” just war theorists, who wish to tie the permissions and prohibitions apply-
ing to individuals in war to their moral liability (see e.g. McMahan 2009; Fabre 2012;
Frowe 2014). The revisionist picture of the just war—​and of jus in bello specifically—​
seeks to make just war principles more “continuous” with ordinary peacetime moral-
ity and the ethics of self-​defence. On revisionist views, the status of combatants in war
should depend on whether they are responsible for unjust threats. Furthermore, for
revisionists, some non-​combatants may also be legitimate targets, to the extent that they
share responsibility for serious enough wrongdoing.
Partly due to their focus on individual defensive killing, revisionist just war theorists
often develop their prescriptions against the background of highly stylized scenarios,
some of which involve far-​fetched self-​defence situations—​e.g. ray-​guns and sizeable
670   Laura Valentini

individuals falling down wells or bridges (e.g. Frowe 2014: 22; McMahan 2009: 172). The
psychological duress, collectivist dimension, and uncertainty that characterize war are
not given much weight.
Although, as discussed earlier, the use of stylized scenarios serves useful theoretical
purposes, it also casts doubt on whether the prescriptions arrived at by appeal to them
are appropriate for their intended context of application: war (Shue 2008). Some con-
temporary revisionist just war theory, then, might also be susceptible to the charge of
idealization, at least to the extent that its prescriptions are (i) meant to apply to war as we
know it and yet (ii) have been developed and tested assuming circumstances that rarely
obtain in real-​world wars (cf. Valentini 2017; Lazar and Valentini 2017). I shall return to
this point in the next section.
The foregoing discussion has shown that the presence of idealizations in a norma-
tive theory raises interesting concerns only when the idealizations are found in the
theory’s conditions of application. In that case, there might be a mismatch between the
theory’s prescriptions and the domain for which they are intended (i.e. the real world).
If so, those prescriptions are ill-​suited to apply to existing circumstances. Otherwise,
the presence of idealizations in the arguments offered in support of a theory is not per
se problematic. And the presence of idealizations in the theory itself is problematic, but
uninterestingly so: it simply means that the theory includes false propositions about
its subject matter (be it international distributive justice, the just war, or something
altogether different).

Responding to the Charge

of Feasibility-​Insensitivity

A second set of challenges raised against ideal theories of international political moral-
ity concerns their insensitivity to feasibility constraints. Once again, several such theor-
ies exist. Here are some well-​known examples:

• Theories of global distributive justice, including the consequentialist view that one
ought to give away all of one’s surplus resources to combat global poverty (Singer
1972), and the cosmopolitan egalitarian injunction to globalize Rawls’s difference
principle (Beitz 1999; Pogge 1989). Both kinds of prescriptions appear to ignore
feasibility constraints such as individuals’ lack of selfless altruism, and the absence
of global institutions powerful enough to realize cosmopolitan global equality.
• Theories of global democracy prescribing the democratization of global politics (e.g.
Held 1995; Archibugi 2008; Marchetti 2008). These have been routinely accused of
ignoring feasibility constraints, such as the lack of inclusive institutions at the glo-
bal level, as well as the lack of a “global demos” (Miller 2010).
• Revisionist theories of the just war that extend the ethics of self-​defence to contexts
of war. These are often criticized for failing to take into account the psychological,
 The Case for Ideal Theory    671

epistemic, and institutional feasibility constraints that are typical of wars. As a

result (so the critique goes), if implemented, their prescriptions would be counter-
productive: leading to more wrongful killing than alternative, orthodox prescrip-
tions (e.g. Buchanan 2006; Shue 2008; cf. McMahan 2008).

Once again, whether the charge of feasibility-​insensitivity is warranted or not depends

on the particular theory we are looking at, and its specific aim. First, there is an entire
class of theories for which feasibility constraints are immaterial, namely purely evalu-
ative theories (Gilabert 2011). These theories do not aim to set out prescriptions and
permissions, “oughts” and “mays.” Instead, they aim to develop standards of evaluation,
allowing us to determine whether a given state of affairs is good or bad, just or unjust.
Since such theories do not issue any “oughts,” they need not concern themselves with
“cans”—​with what is possible or feasible. A state of affairs can be bad, unfair, or regret-
table even if nobody is responsible for bringing it about, and nobody can remedy it. For
example, a natural catastrophe without remedy can be bad, and perhaps even “unfair” or
“unjust” if it hits a specific group of innocent individuals. So, to the extent that theories
are meant to be exclusively evaluative—​hence not directly action-​guiding—​feasibility-​
insensitivity is not a concern (Gilabert 2011; Gheaus 2013; Valentini 2017: 19–​20). And it
may very well be that some demanding cosmopolitan theories requiring global equality,
or global democracy, are best understood as purely evaluative in this sense. They tell us
that there is something to be regretted in the fact that our world is unequal, and globally
undemocratic, even if bringing about a democratic and egalitarian world is currently
not in anyone’s power. In doing so, these purely evaluative theories may play an import-
ant critical function, by highlighting the existence of problematic power relations—​even
if they fail to provide a clear path to remedying them.3
But the retreat to pure evaluation is unlikely to satisfy critics, nor is it one that inter-
national political theorists will particularly want to undertake. For many, the whole
point of theorizing about international political morality is to deliver prescriptions
helping us to orient ourselves in the real world. And when theories are prescriptive, as
opposed to purely evaluative, feasibility constraints matter: “oughts” are valid only when
it is possible/​feasible for their addressees to act on them—​or so I shall assume for pres-
ent purposes.
There are two broad classes of feasibility-​insensitivity for normative theories. First,
there are theories whose prescriptions are genuinely impossible to realize. Second, there
are theories whose prescriptions are unlikely to be acted upon. In what follows, I con-
sider each in turn.
First, some theories may place demands on us that we simply cannot fulfil. Theories
requiring global democracy or equality now might be of this kind. No matter how well-​
intentioned individuals or states might be, global equality or democracy are long-​term
goals that cannot be brought about today. Any theory demanding their immediate real-
ization would thus problematically fall foul of the “ought implies can” constraint (cf.
Meckled-​Garcia 2008). That said, the most charitable reading of international political
theories advocating global democracy or cosmopolitan equality is as evaluative theor-
ies, accompanied by ancillary prescriptions requiring existing agents to do what they
672   Laura Valentini

“reasonably can” towards the achievement of these long-​term goals. A commitment to

global democracy or cosmopolitan equality may thus give rise to what Pablo Gilabert
(2012) calls “dynamic duties,” namely duties to gradually bring about conditions under
which the demands of global justice (or global democracy) can be realized. These duties,
however, would be constrained by feasibility considerations.
Second, we can turn to theories issuing prescriptions that can be fulfilled, but whose
fulfilment is unlikely. Peter Singer’s (1972) demanding principle of global beneficence
is a case in point. People are simply unlikely to be motivated to donate as big a portion
of their earnings as Singer recommends. In fact, faced with Singer’s extreme requests,
they are likely to ignore them. Similarly, it might be argued that revisionist just war
theory asks too much of those engaged in a war. The epistemic and psychological bur-
dens it places on soldiers are so great that they are unlikely to be willing to carry them.
Consequently, the institutionalization of revisionist just war theory risks being counter-
productive: the relevant prescriptions and prohibitions are likely to be either ignored or
misapplied (Shue 2008; McMahan 2008; Lazar and Valentini 2017).
What to say about this line of critique? Several responses can be given. Each of them
shows that “feasibility-​insensitivity” complaints directed at theories whose prescrip-
tions are unlikely to be realized are not really about feasibility, but ultimately derive from
deeper moral controversies. In some cases, a prescription being unlikely to be realized
is just a symptom of the prescription being over-​demanding (Estlund 2011: 222–​3). For
example, Singer’s “solution” to global poverty has come under attack precisely for this
reason. Each individual, so the argument goes, should be allowed to give some priority
to one’s own wellbeing and the wellbeing of those near and dear to one (Scheffler 1994).
Yet Singer’s position on global justice ignores this morally salient fact. The “feasibility cri-
tique” here simply boils down to a substantive moral disagreement about the costs indi-
viduals may reasonably be asked to bear.4 Similar reflections can be advanced in the case
of revisionist theorists of the just war: asking soldiers not to take up arms or not to defend
themselves when in doubt about the justice of their cause may simply be too costly.
In other cases, a theory’s being unlikely to be realized is not a symptom of its over-​
demandingness, but just a by-​product of people’s weakness of will or selfishness (Estlund
2014; 2011). In that case, the “feasibility” critique genuinely has no bite if the theory is
meant to track “the morally right answer.” Yet the critique does have bite if the theory
in question is meant to set out principles that should be efficacious when embodied in
existing laws and institutions. For example, it may be that, in a fully just society, the
tax rate on the richest segment of the population should be 70 per cent (I use a simi-
lar example in Valentini 2017: 26–​7). Yet, under existing circumstances, one can foresee
that such a tax rate would result in considerable tax evasion, tax avoidance, and people
relocating to other countries with a more favourable tax regime (cf. Estlund 2011). This
being so, a theory setting out prescriptions to be embedded into institutions and policies
should take account of likely compliance with them. This point is well understood by
revisionist theorists of the just war, who are explicit about the fact that they are only set-
ting out principles of the “deep” morality of war, rather than principles to be embedded
in the “laws of war” (McMahan 2008; Lazar and Valentini 2017). The latter, revisionist
 The Case for Ideal Theory    673

theorists admit, ought to instead take account of likely compliance and other feasibility
considerations.
In sum, whether the feasibility-​insensitivity critique applies or undermines a given
theory depends on the aim of that theory. If the theory is purely evaluative, feasibility
constraints are irrelevant to its validity. If the theory is prescriptive or normative, such
constraints matter. Prescriptions must satisfy the “ought implies can” proviso. Yet they
need not satisfy an “ought implies likely” constraint, as David Estlund (2011) has already
argued at length. Whether moral demands are likely to be realized or not may matter
morally only when low likelihood is a sign of over-​demandingness, or when principles
are meant to offer policy or institutional prescriptions. Otherwise, the fact that one is
unlikely to act on certain moral demands simply signals one’s moral weakness.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have offered a moderate defence of ideal theory in international polit-
ical theorizing. I have suggested that critiques pointing to theories’ use of idealizations
and insensitivity to feasibility constraints succeed only in a limited number of cases.
Global democrats, cosmopolitan egalitarians, and revisionist just war theorists may be
guilty of all sorts of mistakes in their theorizing, but the charge of “excessive idealism”
is for the most part unlikely to suffice to invalidate their accounts. I have also, indir-
ectly, shown that charges of excessive idealism are too indefinite to carry much signifi-
cance. Instead of employing the catch-​all expression “ideal theory,” it is better to level
one’s charges against each position one disagrees with, pointing to the presence of ideal-
izations where none should be, or to the prescriptions issued by the target theory being
too demanding, impossible to realize, or counterproductive when institutionalized.
Without further explanation, a vague charge of “excessive idealism” carries very little, if
any, weight.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chris Brown, Robyn Eckersley, Seth Lazar, Pietro Maffettone, and David Wiens
for their helpful comments.

Notes
1. This chapter offers an application of ideas developed in Valentini (2009; 2017) and in List
and Valentini (2016) to the domain of IPT in particular.
2. I am here setting aside the so-​called “realist” critique of Rawls-​inspired political theory. For
discussion, see Duncan Bell’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 48).
3. I am grateful to the Editors of this Handbook for pointing this out to me.
674   Laura Valentini

4. Another critique of Singer’s view relates to its lack of sensitivity to the structural causes of
poverty. A policy change, oriented towards greater individual or state donations, in the
absence of deeper structural reforms of the global economy, may contribute to perpetuating
the status quo or possibly have detrimental effects. See e.g. Kuper (2002). This illustrates the
general trade-​off between policy and structural reforms we are likely to face when trying to
make the world more just.

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 Index

Abizadeh, A. 389 divergence from duty of rescue from mass

Abrahamian, E. 277 despair 549–52
Abrahamsen, R. 430 ethical foundations of 546–57
Abu-​Laban, K. 347 to fragile states 555–6
Abu-​Lughod, L. 347, 350 and gay rights 549
accountability 3 historic rationales for 548–9
cross-​cultural accountabilities 460–2 and human rights 549
for decentred political authority 456–8 aid agencies 295–6
definition of 453 air pollution 179
in global economic governance 453–64 Albertyn, C. 352
multi-​scale social strategies 458–60 Alderman, H. 591
proxy accountability 457–8 Alezander, L. A. 55
social accountability 459 Allan, P. 614, 618–19
transnational accountability 458, 459–60, Allen, C. 251, 252
461–2, 463 Allott, P. 64
unaccountable power problem 454–6 Althusser, L. 621
Acemoglu, D. 112 Alston, P. 304
Acker, J. 88 Alter, K. J. 64
Ackerly, B. 94 Altman, D. 371, 372
active denial system (ADS) 241 American Journal of International Law 66
Actor Network Theory (ANT) 250 American Political Science 52
Adams, J. Q. 432 American Revolution 291, 292
Adams, T. 248 Amnesty International 296
Additional Protocols (API, 1977) 233, 235, 237 Amon, J. J. 360
Adler, E. 39–40, 293, 294 Amsterdam Declaration 467
Adorno, T. 75 analytical realism 642–4
ADS (active denial system) 241 anarchy 63
Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in Anderson, E. 487
East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA) 461 Anderson, S. 252
African Union 395 Andrieu, K. 157
Agamben, G. 80, 301 Aneja, U. 323
Agathangelou, A. M. 374–5 Anghie, A. 24, 65, 68, 175
Agenda 21: 179, 533 Annas, J. 588, 589, 590, 591
‘Agenda for Peace’ 304 Anonymous 262
agent regret 137–8, 139 ANSA (Affiliated Network for Social
Ahrensdorf, P. J. 22, 24 Accountability in East Asia and the
aid Pacific) 461
aid for mutual benefit 552–7 Anscombe, E. 588
678   Index

ANT (see Actor Network Theory) associational justice 120–1, 122, 126
Anthias, F. 347, 348, 349, 351–2 Association of Southeast Asian Nations
Anthropocene (ASEAN) 310, 394–5
challenges to IPT 468–75 asylum seekers 521, 524
deep-​time interdependencies 470 asymmetric conflict 233–44
and democracy 472–3 associated targets 239–40
functional interdependence 469–70 human shields 236, 237, 243
and global governance 467–77 and IPT 234
global inequality in 119–20, 123–4, 471–2 nature of 235–6
global interdependence 468–9 participatory liability 238–41
human agency, redefinition of 473–5 proportionality 237
and uncertainty 471 soft war 241–3
Antigone (Sophocles) 21 uniforms, lack of 236–7, 243
antinomianism 591 see also guerrillas/​guerrilla warfare
API (Additional Protocols, 1977) 233, 235, 237 atmospheric aerosol loading 474
Apostolopoulos, Y. 87 Attfield, R. 180, 181, 183
Appiah, A. 290 Audi, R. 589, 590–1
Aquinas, T. 213, 215–16, 223 Augustine of Hippo, St 22, 201, 210–11, 215–16
Arab Spring (Arab Awakening) 203, Austin, J. 62, 204
233, 282–4 authority 196, 197–8, 199
Arat, Z. F. K. 351 humanitarian actors and 324–5
Archibugi, D. 387, 400, 420, 670 violence and 196–200
ARC International and ILGA 371 Autonomous Weapons Systems 248, 251
Arendt, H. 61, 291, 300, 390 Axelrod, R. 54, 263
authority 196, 197–8, 199 Aymara Indians, Bolivia 349
and critical theory 77 al-​Azami, M. M. 201
on Kant 575, 577
rules 204
violence 197–8, 279 Bäckstrand, K. 457
Aristotle 577, 579–80, 583 Bacon, C. 514
eudaimonia 582 Baechler, J. 590
Nicomachean Ethics 590, 592–3, 594, 595 Bainton, R. 201
phronesis 576 Bai, X. 473
Politics 593 Baker, S. 181
Arkin, R. 251 Balibar, E. 77
Arkin, W. 238 Ball, D. 514
Armitage, D. 22, 25, 61 Bamberger, M. 515
Armstrong, C. 295, 492n2 Ban Ki-​moon 136, 320, 330, 371, 569
Arneil, B. 347 Barber, B. 435
Arnould, E. 514 Bargu, B. 80
Aron, R. 51 Barham, B. 514, 515
Arquilla, J. 248, 259 Bar Joseph, U. 236, 239
Arrighi, G. 662n6 Barkbu, B. 124
Arthur, C. J. 662n8 Barnes, M. 566
Arthur, P. 154 Barnett, M.
Articles on Perpetual Peace (Kant) 63 humanitarianism 317, 324, 497, 503, 504, 565
Asimov, I. 252–3 republicanism 634
 Index   679

Barry, B. 118, 181–2, 189, 402 Benhabib, S. 388, 402

Barry, C. 528–9 Benjamin, W. 75, 198–200, 206
Barry, J. 635 Benner, T. 456–7
Bartelson, J. 615 Bentham, J. 62
Bartkowski, M. 281 Berlin, I. 585
Bartley, T. 459 Berman, N. 63, 65
Bashir, O. 324 Berman, S. 434
Bassel, L. 350–1, 353 Besson, S. 44
Bassett, T. 514, 515 Betts, A. 522, 523, 525
Basu, S. 94 Betts, R. 583
Battaly, H. 589 Bevir, M. 217, 605
Bauböck, R. 12 Bexell, M. 417
Bauer, P. 486–7 Bhuta, N. 325
Bauman, Z. 249 Biene, J. 618
Baxter, B. 183, 184, 188 Biggar, N. 216
Beardsworth, R. 629 Bilal, S. 510
Becchetti, L. 514 Billon, P. 514
Becker, J. 304 bin Laden, O. 202
Becker, L. C. 587 biocentrism 188
Becker Lorca, A. 65, 69 biodiversity loss 179, 187, 474
Beckerman, W. 181–2, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190n2 bioterrorism 361
Beckett, J. 60, 63 Bismarck, O. von 65–6
Beck, U. 84, 471 Björkdahl, A. 161
Bedford, K. 379 Black, J. 457
Begby, E. 215 Blair, J. 606
beheading 195, 206 Blair, T. 645
Beissinger, M. 348 Blake, M. 38, 176n1, 517n5, 526
Beitz, C. R. 22, 54, 55, 118, 670 coercion 106, 120
communitarianism 39, 40, 44–5 distributive justice 105, 106
cosmopolitanism 37, 38, 39, 44–5 Bleiker, R. 575–6, 600
distributive justice 104, 105, 666 Bloch, M. 216
duty of assistance (DA) 485 Bloor, D. 577
and English School 55 Blum, G. 317
ethical foreign policy 498, 499, 644 Boas, I. 469
global democracy 417 Bob, C. 310
human rights 44–5, 293, 299, 306, 307, 308 Bodin, J. 22
just war theory 223 Boellstorff, T. 372
LGBTQ rights 373–4 Boesenecker, A. 161
political legitimacy 402 Bohman, J. 78, 400, 422, 445, 631, 632
and practical turn in liberal IPT 43 Boisen, C.
theory of justice 667 Boko Haram 556
Belkin, A. 89, 90–1, 579 Bolivia 349, 514
Bellamy, A. 203–4, 216, 217, 321, 335, 336 Boltanski, L. 409
Bellamy, R. 627, 632 Bonacker, T. 155
Bell, C. 159 Booth, K. 50, 498, 500
Bell, D. 25, 634, 504 borders, control of 520–2
Bell, D. A. 345 Borg, J. S. 606
680   Index

Borradori, G. 80 Buchanan, B. 266

Börzel, T. A. 309 Buckinx, B. 410
Bosanquet, B. 26 Buck-​Morss, S. 81, 82
Boucher, D. 41 Bukovansky, M. 132
Bourguignon, F. 487 Bulley, D. 41
Boutros-​Ghali, B Bull, H. 22, 40, 50, 55, 499, 503, 504
Bouvet, H. 213 Bunch, C. 350, 351
Bovens, M. A. P. 460 Burchill, S. 156
Bowen, J. 351 Burgis-​Kasthala, M. 149
Bowles, S. 431 burqa ban 343, 353
boycotts 273 Burrage, H. 345, 350
Boyle, J. 60 Bush, G. W. 240, 542
Brahimi Report 321 Butler, J. 80, 89
Braidotti, R. 437 Butterfield, H. 504
brain drain 527–9 Butterfield, R. 209
Braithwaite, J. 150 Byers, M. 68
Brandt, R. B. 590
Brasset, J. 41
Braun, M. 214 Cabrera, L. 388, 400
Brecke, P. 600 Callicott, J. B. 188
Brett, A. 69 Callinicos, A. 658
Brexit controversy 83 calmative agents 241
Bridoux, J. 429, 432, 433 Calo, M. 514, 515
Brilmayer, L. 143 Cambodia 293, 461, 462
Brincat, S. 614 Cameron, D. 376
Brock, G. 516n2, 527 Campaign to Stop Killer Robots 251
Bromley, P. 170 Campbell, M. 150
Brondizio, E. S. 467 Canada: indigenous peoples 172–3
Brown, C. 3, 24, 36, 40–1, 139, 166, 216, 217, Canadian International Development Agency
268, 306, 613, 654, 662n1 (CIDA) 560
ethical foreign policy 499 Cancun, United Nations Framework
history of IR 49, 50 Convention on Climate Change
Brown, G. W. 362 (COP-​16) 535
Brown, L. D. 455, 459 Canetti, D. 241
Brownlie, I. 27 Caney, S. 120, 162, 358, 484, 562, 667
Brown, T. 361 capital punishment 198
Brown, W. 80, 659 capitalism 652–3, 655–61
Brubaker, R. 348 and class 655–6
Brunkhorst, H. 79, 387–8 Marx’s critique of 659–61
Brunstetter, D. 214 monopoly capitalism 657
Brysk, A. 304 Caraway, T. L. 124
Buchanan, A. 299, 488, 671 care: and humanitarianism 563–7
cosmopolitanism 37, 38, 39 care ethics 95
global democracy 415, 418, 422, 423 Carens, J. H. 520, 531n1
humanitarianism 316 Carr, E. H. 50, 51, 498, 504, 646, 649, 650
international law 44–5 Carter, A. 282
political legitimacy 400, 401, 408, 410 Casebeer, W. D. 604
and practical turn in liberal IPT 43 Cass, D. 62
 Index   681

Cassese, A. 144–5 civil society participation 445, 447

Cavelt, D. 262–3 Clapper, J. 263
CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity) 533 Clarke, J. 622n3
CBDR (common but differentiated Clarke, K. M. 150
responsibility) principle 533, 534, 537, 539 Clarke, R. 253
Celis, K. 353 Clarke, R. A. 265–6
censorship 242 Clark, G. 51
Centre for International Development Issues, Clark, G. K. 216, 217
Netherlands 515 Clark, H. 239
Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Clark, I. 23, 68, 212
(CDC) 361 Claude, I. 169
Chad 550, 556 Clausewitz, C. von 27, 199, 262
Chamayou, G. 248–9 Cleckly, H. 606
Chamberlain, N. 23 Clément, M. 618, 621
Chambers, S. 441 climate change 134, 138, 184–5, 474
Chang, H.-​J. 122, 124 aid for mitigation of 556–7
Chappell, T. 587, 588 climate models 471
Charlesworth, H. 88 and inequality 182
Charter 77, Czechoslovakia 278, 502 and migration 469
Chase-​Dunn, C. 662n6 temperature target 475
chemical pollution 474 climate debt 470
chemical weapons 241 climate equity 533–44
Chemical Weapons Convention (1992) 241 challenges for 535–7
Chenoweth, E. 282 real-​world climate efforts 541–3
Chen, S. 471–2 climate migrants 470
Chesterman, S. 455–6, 457 Clinton, H.: gay rights 371, 372, 374, 375
Chhachhi, A. 564 Cmeil, K. 292
Chicago Tribune 209 Codex Florentino 26
Chiesura, A. 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189 coercion
Chimni, B. S. 145 democracy and 388–9
Chopra, M. 531n2 distributive justice and 105, 106
Choucri, N. 264, 267 human rights and 313
Christianity 200–1 inequality and 120
Christiano, T. 418 nonviolent coercion 276–7
Christine de Pisan 213, 215 R2P and 334
Christov, T. 25 violence and 198
Churchill, W. 22, 23, 580 cognitive overload 249–50
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 21 Cohen, J. L. 78–9, 81, 82, 150, 306, 388
CIDA (see Canadian International Cold War 145, 278, 321, 495, 501,
Development Agency) 502, 548
circumstantial luck 133–5, 140 Cole, P. 520, 526
civil disobedience 273, 274 collateral damage 250, 296–7
civil resistance 273 Collier, P. 111–12
antagonists and 280–1 Collingwood, R. G. 24
concept of 274–7 Collins, R. 327
and democratic outcomes 281–3 colonialism 112, 197
power politics and nonviolent Commission on Social Determinants of
struggle 277–80 Health (CSDH) 363
682   Index

common but differentiated responsibility COP-​21 (Paris Agreement, United Nations

(CBDR) principle 533, 534, 537, 539 Framework Convention on Climate
communicable diseases 357 Change) 472, 475, 534–5, 539–40, 542
communitarianism 39–41, 42, 44–5 Cordesman, A. H. 238–9
constructivist (new) Cornish, P. 267
communitarianism 39–40 cosmopolitan democracy 631
cosmopolitan/​communitarian debate 35–7, cosmopolitan equality 671–2
40–1, 42, 55 cosmopolitanism 35–9, 40, 42, 44–5, 290–1
conditionality 124, 313, 514, 548, 549, cosmopolitan/​communitarian debate 35–7,
551, 554 40–1, 42, 55, 175
Conference on Security and Cooperation in critical theory and 74, 76–8, 84
Europe (CSCE) 502 Habermas and 76, 78
Confucius 27 and minority rights 171–2
Connelly, J. 189 and political legitimacy 406
Connor, W. 344 and R2P 331–3, 334, 336, 337
Conrad, J. 266 republican cosmopolitanism 78
constitutive luck 137–9, 140 rooted cosmopolitanism 173
constructivism 3–4 and sovereignty 332
constructivist (new) terrestrial cosmopolitanism 171–3
communitarianism 39–40, 42–3 Costanza, R. 183, 185, 186
contemporary asymmetric war: challenges Costa Rica 511–12
of 234–44 Cottingham, J. 601
contestatory democracy 628 Council of Castile 24
contingent pacifism 222 Council of Europe
Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Convention on Preventing and Combating
Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries Violence against Women and Domestic
170, 171 Violence 146
Convention on Biological Diversity European Charter for Regional or Minority
(CBD) 533 Languages 170, 171
Convention on Crimes Against Framework Convention for the Protection
Humanity 304 of National Minorities (FCNM) 170, 171,
Convention on Preventing and Combating 176nn7&8
Violence against Women and Domestic Covell, C. 22, 25, 27
Violence 146 Cover, R. 205
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Cox, R. 7, 76, 495, 662n7
of Discrimination against Women 359 Crane, R. S. 300
Convention on the Rights of the Child 359 Craven, M. 63, 68, 69
Cook, J. 268 Crawford, N. C. 239, 600–1, 602
Cook, R. 499–500 Crenshaw, K. 354n3
Cooley, A. 305, 309 crimes against humanity 63, 67, 149, 155,
COP-​16 (United Nations Framework Convention 332, 496
on Climate Change, Cancun) 535 Crisp, R. 588
COP-​19 (United Nations Framework Convention critical theory 3–4, 7, 74–84
on Climate Change, Warsaw) 539 critiques of empire 81–3
COP-​20 (United Nations Framework future of sovereignty 83–4
Convention on Climate Change, Habermasian 76–9
Lima) 539 and international relations 75–6
 Index   683

post-​structural responses to war on Das, R. 588

terror 79–81 Davidson, D. 576
Cronin, A. K. 618 Davies, S. E. 361
cross-​cultural accountabilities 460–2 DDoS (distributed denial of service) 264
Crutzen, P. 467 De Búrca, G. 408
CSCE (see Conference on Security and Declaration of the Five Cabinets,
Cooperation in Europe) Aix-​la-​Chapelle 66
CSDH (see Commission on Social Declaration on the Establishment of a
Determinants of Health) NIEO 145–6
cultural difference 39 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
cultural identity 343, 348 People 170, 171, 175, 176n6
cultural rights 310 Declaration on the Rights of Persons
currency speculation 124–5 Belonging to National or
Curren, R. 179 Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic
Cushman, F 603 Minorities 170, 171
Cutler, A. C. 455 deep-​time interdependencies 470
Cutler, C. 405 deforestation 179
cyber espionage 267 de Groot, R. 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 223
cyber justice 268 Deitelhoff, N. 446
cyber security 259–69 De jure belli ac pacis (Grotius) 148
cyber conflict, nature of 263–5 de la Boétie, É. 274
cyber espionage 267 de la Chapelle, B. 267
cyber institutions and governance 267–8 deliberation
cyber power and force, nature of 265–6 and deliberative democracy 441–3
cyber threat, nature of 262–3 development of 443–6
definitional issues 261–2 empirical evidence 446–9
legalist/​moralist debate 268 and global governance 440–50
Sony Hack 260, 263 deliberative democracy 345–6, 441–3, 444–5,
cyber warfare 241–2 446–7, 448–9
deliberative supranationalism 444
Demchak, C. 267
Daase, C. 614, 615, 618, 621 democracy 3
Dagger, R. 627, 635 ‘all affected’ approach 388, 391–3, 396
Dahbour, O. 388 ‘all subjected’ approach 388, 389, 390
Dahl, H. M. 95 Anthropocene and 472–3
Dahl, R. A. 400 common activities approach 389–90, 392–5
Dallmayr, F. R. 461 contestatory democracy 628
Daly, H. 181–2, 183, 185, 186 deliberative democracy 345–6
Damasio, A. 602 democracy support 428–31
D’Amato, A. 60 democratic transformation, directions
D’Amico, F. 371 for 394–8
Daniels, N. 358 ethics of promotion of 427–38
Dany, C. 447 global democracy 387, 390, 400
Darby, D. 365 and global governance 385–98
Darfur conflict 324 and global political legitimacy 400–11
Darwin, C. 256 procedural democracy 350–2
d’Aspremont, J. 63 and republicanism 628
684   Index

democracy (cont.) Dollar, D. 549

social movements 398 Dombrowski, P. 267
and sovereignty 404 Domingo, F. C. 259
substantive democracy 345–6 dominium 628
transnational democracy, scope of 388–94 Donaghue v. Stevenson 579
varied liberal ethics and democracy Doppelt, G. 39
promotion 431–4 Doris, J. M. 590
see also global democracy Douglas, L. 67
democracy promotion 428–38 Douthat, R. 230
ethics of 431–4 Douzinas, C. 77, 79, 373
ethics of alternative models 434–7 dowries: India 350
democracy support 428–31 Doyle, M. 39, 49
depoliticization of democracy Dragusanu, R. 515
promotion 428 Drahos, P. 150
ethics of 431–4 drones 247–50
liberal consensus on democracy in Drucker, P. 372
promotion 429 Dryzek, J. S. 180, 397, 400, 406, 442, 473
local ownership in policy agenda 430 global democracy 416, 420–1, 423–4,
Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) 239 445, 446
Democratic Republic of the Congo republicanism 632, 635
(DRC) 321, 322, 326 Dua, E. 173
Dennett, D. 415 Dübgen, F. 616
deontology 587–92, 597 Duggan, L. 375–6
Department for International Development Dumont, L. 230
(DFID) 553, 555 Duncombe, C. 621
Der Derian, J. 23 Dunne, T. 613
Derrida, J. 80, 205 Dunn, J. 25
de Sousa Santos, C. A. 78, 84 Durkheim, E. 225
deterrence 264–5 duties of rescue 546–57
Deudney, D. 630–1, 634 aid for mutual benefit 552–7
Deveaux, M. 346, 351, 352 duty of rescue from catastrophe 546, 550
Devetak, R. 630–1 duty of rescue from mass despair 547,
Dewey, J. 402–3 549–52, 553, 554–5
DFID (see Department for International duty of assistance (DA)
Development) concreteness of 486–8
Dhamoon, R. K. 347, 354n3 content of 485–92
Dhawan, N. 161 precision of 488–92
dignity 306, 364–5 and public policy 486–9, 492
Dingwerth, K. 445 Rawls 483–4, 485
Dipert, R. R. 268 Duvall, R. 267
direct-​deliberative polyarchy 444 Dworkin, R. 61, 421
Discourses, The (Machiavelli) 50
distributed denial of service (see DDoS)
distributive justice 147, 423: see also global Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro 533
distributive justice earth system boundaries 474–5
Dobson, A. 180, 181, 187, 188 Earth System Governance Project 476
Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Eberle, C. J. 268
Frontières, MSF) 295, 300, 323–4, 569 Ebrahim, A. 459
 Index   685

Eckersley, R. 472, 541 ethics of recognition 612–22

ecocentrism 188 literature on 613–15
ecologism 188 ethnic cleansing 153, 167, 332
Economic and Social Council Euben, P. 138
(ECOSOC) 396 European Charter for Regional or Minority
economic warfare 241–2 Languages 170, 171
Edkins, J. 563, 564 European Council 429
Edmonds, D. 581 European Monetary Union (EMU) 83
education inequality 119 Evans, G. 333, 499, 500
Ehrenreich, B. 256 Evans, T. 364
Eichengreen, B. 125 ‘Evidence’ (Asimov) 252–3
Ekins, P. 183–4, 185, 188 expectations: horizon of 25–6, 27, 28, 29
Elder, S. 514, 515 experiences: space of 25–6, 28
electromagnetic weapons 241
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 28
Elias, N. 203 Fabre, C. 196, 226, 666, 669
El-​Khawas, M. A. 531n2 Fabry, M. 622n2
Elliott, M. A. 225, 230 fair trade 508–16
Elshtain, J. B. 91, 201, 215 alternative approach 513–16
Elster, J. 447, 600 banana farming 512, 514
Emejulu, A. 353 coffee growers 512, 515
emotions 600–9 practice-​based accounts of 509–13
empire 81–2 and public policy 508–16
empirical inquiry 10–11 Falk, R. A. 60
empirical research 4–5, 8 Fanon, F. 197, 199, 206, 616, 621
EMU (European Monetary Union) 83 FARC-​EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Enemark, C. 212 Colombia-​People’s Army) 618–19
Engels, F. 662n2 Fariss, C. J. 304
English School 3, 42, 55–6: see also Bull, H. Farmer, P. 358
Enloe, C. 88, 91, 92 Farrell, A. 351
Enquiry into the Foundation and History Farrell, H. 305
of International Law in Europe, An Farrelly, C. 423, 666
(Ward) 68 FAS (Federation of American
environmental governance 38–9 Scientists) 238–9
environmental justice: and Fass, A. 472
sustainability 179–90 Fassin, D. 299, 316–17
Epstein, H. 549 fasting 273
Eriksen, E. O. 444 feasibility
Erman, E. 408 challenge to realism 641–4
Eslava, L. 61, 65 economic feasibility 643–4
Estlund, D. 10, 415, 672, 673 feasibility-​insensitivity 670–3
ethical foreign policy 495–505, 644 political feasibility 112–13, 643–4
ethical reasoning 41–2, 43 feasibility constraints 8, 9, 407, 415–16,
Ethics (Spinoza) 28 420, 665
ethics of care democracy 385, 400
care and humanitarianism 563–7 insensitivity to 670–3
feminist practical 559–70 Federation of American Scientists
IPT and 560–3 (FAS) 238–9
686   Index

Feinberg, J. 133 Francis of Assisi, St 22

Feldman, I. 290 Franck, T. 64, 146, 147
female genital mutilation (FGM) 12, 308, Franke, K. 377
345, 350–1 Frankfurt School 74, 75, 84
female prostitution 91 Fraser, N. 77–8, 346, 365–6, 442, 613, 614, 621
feminism Frazer, E. 80
feminist theory 3–4 Frazer, M. L. 601
practical ethics of care 559–70 Frede, D. 587
feminist IPT 87–97 Fredman, S. 150
applicability of 96–7 Freeden, M. 432, 453–4, 461
gender and sexuality, signification of 92–6 freedom fighters 235–6
gender, meaning of 89–92 Freedom House 305, 309
women in global politics 88–9 Freeman, S. 484
Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) 351 French, P. 132
Ferree, M. M. 351 French Revolution 291, 292
Ferretti, M. P. 448 Friedman, A. 241
Ferris, E. G. 323 Friedman, M. 52–3
Festa, L. 300 Friedrich, D. 448
FGM (female genital mutilation) 12, 308, friendships 526
345, 350–1 Frost, M. 42, 53, 55
Fierke, K. 562 Frowe, H. 666, 669–70
financial aid 486–7 Fukuda-​Parr, S. 596
Financial Transaction Tax (Tobin Tax) 124–5 functional interdependence: new types
Finkelstein, L. S. 405 of 469–70
Finnemore, M. 305, 529 Fung, A. 392, 397, 410, 411n2
Fishkin, J. S. 441, 442 Furceri, D. 124
Fixdal, M. 268
Flathman, R. 197
Fletcher, G. F. 222 Gacaca tribunals, Rwanda 155, 160
Flockhart, T. 613 Gadamer, H. G. 582
Floyd, J. 409 Gage, P. 602
FMF (Feminist Majority Foundation) 351 Galaz, V. 474
Foot, P. 588, 603 Gallagher, A. 334
Foot, R. 501, 502 Gallie, W. B. 306, 434
Ford, H. 209 Gallup, J. 111–12
foreign policy 495–505 Galston, W. 483
definition of 497 Galston, W. A. 283, 415
ethics and 497–501 Galtung, J. 206n3
Forsberg, T. 616, 617 game theory 52
Forsythe, D. P. 230 Gammon, E. 600
Forsyth, M. 22 Gandhi, M. K. 23, 274–6, 279
Fossum, J. E. 444 García-​Godos, J. 619
Foucault, M. 61, 195, 199, 200, 307 Gardam, J. 296–7
Fox, J. 455, 459 Garretón, M. A. 280
Framework Convention for the Protection of Gartzke, E. 260, 262, 264, 266, 267
National Minorities (FCNM) 170, 171, Garvey, N. 459
176nn7&8 Garwood-​Gowers, A. 333
 Index   687

Gas War, Bolivia 349 application of principles of 111–12

Gathii, J. T. 145, 146 conceptualization of subject matter
Gaventa, J. 459 of 114–15
Gavison, R. 225 content of principles of 107–11
gay rights 371, 372, 374–9, 549: see also desirabilty 113
LGBTQ rights formulation of questions of 114
Gazzaniga, M. 605 possibility and political feasibility 112–13
Gbagbo, L. 321 scope of 104–7
GCF (Green Climate Fund) 542–3 global economic governance 453–64
Gearty, C. 373 cross-​cultural accountabilities 460–2
Geers, K. 265 for decentred political authority 456–8
gender theory 3–4, 94 definition of 453
Geneva Conventions 233, 255, 293, 318 multi-​scale social strategies 458–60
genocide 139, 146–7, 149, 167, 332, 503 proxy accountability 457–8
Rwanda 155, 160 social accountability 459
Gentili, A. 213 transnational accountability 458, 459–60,
Gentz, F. von 50 461–2, 463
geo-​engineering 469–70 unaccountable power problem 454–6
George, A. L. 265 global egalitarianism 118–27
Gerstenberg, O. 444 associational justice 120–1, 122
Geuss, R. 409, 415, 595, 596, 644–5, global inequality 119–20
646, 649–50 justificatory respect 121, 126
Gheaus, A. 671 membership-​dependent
Gibney, M. 524 cosmopolitanism 120–2, 126
Gibson-​Graham, J. K. 156 practice, context, and critique 126–7
Gilabert, P. 9, 120, 415, 642, 665, 671, 672 reforms 122–5
Gilligan, C. 560–1, 562–3, 565 Global Environmental Facility 542–3
Gill, S. 662n7 global freshwater use 474
Gilman, N. 145, 146 global governance 385–98
Gindin, S. 658 Anthropocene and 467–77
Gintis, H. 431 deliberation 440–50
Giovanni da Legnano 213–14 democratic deficit 386–8
Givoni, M. 324 democratic transformation, directions
Gladwell, M. 312 for 394–8
Glanville, L. 335 social movements 398
global climate governance 470 transnational democracy, scope of 388–94
global constitutionalism 79 global governance networks 457
global democracy 387, 390, 400, 414–24, global inequality 119–20, 123–4, 471–2
435–6, 670, 671–2 global interdependence: new types of 468–9
empirical constraints on construal globalization: democratic deficit 386–8
of 415–18 globalized sovereignty 629–30, 631, 636
empirical constraints on promotion global justice theory 3
of 418–21 global legal pluralism 78–9
moral concerns 421–4 global poverty 111, 119–20, 125, 339, 543, 550,
moral constraints on construal of 421–2 553, 635, 642–3, 666, 670, 672
moral constraints on promotion of 422–4 global sexuality politics 370, 372
global distributive justice 103–16, 666, 670 global warming 179
688   Index

Goerzig, C. 618 Guitton, C. 262

Goetz, A.-​M. 455 Gulf War (1991) 217, 261
Golder, B. 307 Gustafsson, K. 614, 617, 621
Goldstein, J. 91 Gutner, T. 408
Goldstone, D. J. 268 Guzman, A. 68
Goodhart, M. 422, 455
Goodin, R. 391, 402, 418, 423, 482
Good Kill (film) 255 Haacke, J. 614
Goodman, W. 265 Haas, P. M. 471
Goodwin, B. 254 Habermas, J. 75, 80, 81, 83, 306, 346, 420,
Goodwin-​Gill, G. S. 27 444, 449
Gorbachev, M. 502 critical theory 76–9
Gordon, J. 242 international legal system 74, 150
Gordon, U. 174 Hadfield, A. 497
Gornitzka, A. 448 Hafner-​Burton, E. 309, 313
Gosine, A. 379 Haidt, J. 603, 606–7
Gould, C. 418 Haldemann, F. 620
Gould, H. 205 Hall, I. 25, 50, 217
governance institutions: democratic Halsaa, B. 351
deficit 386–8 Hansen, L. 262
Gramsci, A. 279, 658–9 Hansen, T. O. 155
Grant, R. W. 400, 455 Hanson, D. 23
Grasso, M. 541 happiness (eudaimonia) 581, 582
Gratian (Flavius Gratianus Augustus) 215–16 Hardt, M. 81–2
Gready, P. 150 Harel, A. 238
Great Recession 122 Hare, R. 606
green capitalism 189 Harraway, D. 436
Green Climate Fund (GCF) 542–3 Harries, R. 217
Greene, J. 603–4 Hart, H. L. A. 204, 579
green political theory 3–4 Harvey, D. 351, 658
Grewal, I. 347 Haskell, T. 291, 300
Grewe, W. 68 Haufler, V. 405, 455
Griggs, D. 179, 181–2, 185 Hauser, M. 603
Gronau, J. 615–16 Havel, V. 278
Gross, M. 212 Haydar, B. 492n3
Gross, M. L. 266 Hayden, P. 613
Grotius, H. ( Hugo de Groot) 21–2, 27, 49, 61, Hayward, T. 188
148, 213, 215–16 headhunting 195, 206
group polarization 443, 449 health 357–67
groupthink 443, 448 as basic human right 358–60
Guardian Datablog 235 infectious diseases 361–2
Guelff, R. 27 pandemics 361
guerrillas/​guerrilla warfare 233, 235–7, poverty and 363–6
238–9, 242 recognition theory approach to human
just warfare 243–4 rights 364–6
political wings 239, 240 social determinants of 360–3
Guetzkow, H. S. 269 health inequalities 119, 362, 364, 366
 Index   689

health security 360–3 Hoover, J. 373

Heathcote, G. 65 Hopgood, S. 155, 292
Hegel, G. W. F. 28, 50, 56, 118, 622n1, 660 Hopwood, B. 180
Hehir, A. 204, 335 Horkheimer, M. 75, 76
Heins, V. 613, 614, 621 Horton, K. 487
Hekman, S. 95 Hovell, D. 64
Held, D. 27, 387, 400, 420, 436, 455, 631, 670 Howard, M. 247
Helsinki Accords 55, 278, 292 Howse, R. 63, 65
Helsinki Final Act, Conference on Security HRW (Human Rights Watch) 240
and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) 502 Hughes, C. 460, 462
Helsinki Watch Committees 502 Hughes, J. 235
Henkin, L. 304 Hull, I. 69
Herodotus 21 human capital 183, 184–5, 186, 187
Herz, J. 504, 646, 647 human dignity 255–6
Hess, D. 280 humanitarian action 38–9, 316–27
Heymann, J. 567 conflicting values 324–5
Heyward, M. 538 individualization of war 317–18
Heywood, M. 366 values and principles 318–19
Hezbollah 203, 237 see also United Nations (UN )
Higate, P. 91 humanitarian intervention 66, 139, 203, 223,
High Ambition Coalition 539–40 224, 229: see also responsibility to protect
Hill, C. 497 (R2P) doctrine
Hill Collins, P. 354n3 humanitarianism 289–301, 497, 503–4
Hinton, A. L. 158 activities 297–9
Hitler, A. 22, 23, 67 care and 563–7
HIV/​AIDS 357, 366, 531n2, 550 humanity and history 290–3
HMI (Human Machine Interaction) 250 and human rights, differences
Hobbesian tradition 23 between 293–4
Hobbes, T. 22, 23, 25, 28, 29–30, 60–1 principles 295–7
Hobsbawn, E. 214–15, 657 purpose of 294–5
Hobson, C. 616 relationship to politics 297
Hobson, J. A. 432 and sovereignty 299–300
Hoffman, M. J. 537 and suffering 300–1
Hoffmann, S. 648–9 Humanitarian NGOs 323–4
Höglund, K. 161 humanitarian warfare 39
Holland, T. E. 63 Human Machine Interaction (HMI) 250
Hollinger, D. 291 human rights 44–5, 76–8, 289–301, 304–14,
Hollis, M. 498 501–2, 549
Holst, C. 448 activities 297–9
Holsti, K. 498 empirical problems 309–12
homocapitalism 378–9 foundations 305–7
homocolonialism 377–8 gay rights as 374–9
homonationalism 376–7 and humanitarianism, differences
homonormativity 375–6 between 293–4
homosexuality 91–2 humanity and history 290–3
Honig, B. 464 impact assessments 393–4
Honneth, A. 364, 365 and international migration 520–31
690   Index

human rights (cont.) feasibility-​insensitivity 670–3

LGBTQ rights as 370–2 idealizations 666–70
multipolarity 312–13 IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross
personhood 307–8, 310 and Red Crescent Societies) 290
principles 295–7 Ignatieff, M. 503
purpose of 294–5 IHL (international humanitarian law) 233,
recognition theory 364–6 234, 251, 296–7, 325
and sovereignty 299–300 IHRL (international human rights law) 74, 77,
structural problems 305–8 84, 325
and suffering 300–1 IICK (Independent International Commission
see also health on Kosovo) 136–7
Human Rights Charter 310 IISS (International Institute of Strategic
Human Rights Committee 359 Studies) 238
human rights institutions 43 Ikäheimo, H. 612, 614
human rights movement 64 Iliev, R. 263
Human Rights Watch (HRW) 240 ILO (International Labour Organization) 170,
human shields 236, 237, 243 171, 396
Hume, D. 52, 61, 576, 578, 584–5, 601, 602, 604 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 124,
Humphrey, M. 620 514, 554
Hunter, I. 61 Imhof, S. 514
Hunters, The (Salter) 255 immigration 38–9, 123: see also migration
Hunt, L. 291, 292 impartiality 296, 299, 318, 319, 320–1
Hurka, T. 588, 590 imperialism theory 81–2, 657–8
Hurrell, A. 42–3, 418 imperium 628
Hursthouse, R. 590, 591, 592 independence 295, 296, 318
Hutchings, K. 41, 76, 80, 95, 159, 559, 570n1 Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation
Hutchinson, J. F. 299–300 and Gender Identity (SOGI) 371
Hutchison, E. 600 Independent International Commission on
Huyse, L. 160 Kosovo (IICK) 136–7
indigenous peoples 349–50
individual rights: and just war theory
IBON International 396 (JWT) 221–31
ICANN (see International Corporation for inequality 311
Assignment Names and Numbers) climate change and 182
ICC (see International Criminal Court) and coercion 120
ICESCR (see International Covenant on education inequality 119
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) global inequality 119–20, 123–4, 471–2
ICIs (international cooperative health inequality 119, 357
initiatives) 538 sustainable development and 182
ICISS (see International Commission on wealth inequality 119
Intervention and State Sovereignty) infectious diseases 361–2
ICJ (see International Court of Justice) innocent causation 138
ICRC, see International Committee of the input legitimacy 402–3
Red Cross insurgents 243–4
idealism 647 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
ideal theory 10, 664–73 (IPCC) 134, 179, 180, 184, 471
definition of 665–6 international anarchy 445–6
 Index   691

International Bank for Reconstruction 548 normativity and centralization 63–4

International Commission on Intervention war and crime 65–7
and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 136, international legal positivism 62–3
330, 568–9 international migration: human rights
International Committee of the Red Cross and 520–31
(ICRC) 251, 293, 299–300 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 124, 514, 455
core principles 295, 296–7 International Organization for Migration
international cooperative initiatives (IOM) 530
(ICIs) 538 international political theory (IPT)
International Corporation for Assignment capabilities approach 593–7
Names and Numbers (ICANN) 261, 267 and IR 35–6
International Court of Justice (ICJ) 145, 148 practical turn 43–4, 481–3
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rawls’ duty of assistance 483–4
Rights 359 and real world politics 481–92
International Covenant on Economic, international relations (IR) 3–4, 10, 39–41,
Social and Cultural Rights 495–505
(ICESCR) 358–9, 362–3 constructivist IR theory 56–7
International Criminal Court (ICC) 63, 145, ethics and foreign policy 497–501
149, 155, 156–7, 304 history of 48–51
international criminal justice 66–7 and international law 68
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and IPT 35–6
(ICTR) 149 normative political theory and 54–6
International Criminal Tribunal for the phronesis 24
Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) 149 realist/​pluralist traditions 38
International Federation of Red Cross and scientific study of 51–4
Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) 290 international thought, history of 21–30, 56
International Finance Corporation, World emblematic past 22–3, 26, 28
Bank Group 554 experiences/​expectations 25–6
international humanitarian law (IHL) 233, historical past 25, 26
234, 251, 296–7, 325 practical past 23–4, 26
international human rights law (IHRL) 74, 77, intersectionality 310, 349, 352–3, 354n3
84, 325 intervention 3, 66, 499
International Institute of Strategic Studies IOM (International Organization for
(IISS) 238 Migration) 530
international justice 143–51 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
concept of 146–8 Change) 134, 179, 180, 184, 471
as international criminal justice 149–50 Iraq War (2003) 205
statist theory 666 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 243
International Labour Organization (ILO) 170, Iser, M. 613, 620, 621–2
171, 396 Ishay, M. R. 306
international law (IL) 60–9, 143–51, 175, 227–8 Isidore of Seville 213
Charter/​Westphalian order 144–5 Isiksel, T. 79
classical international law 62–3 IS/​ISIS 236, 262, 371
critique of 65 Islam 343, 347
historical turn 68–9 Muslim culture 345–6
and international relations 68 Muslim women 352–3
modern international law 63–5 and violence 201–2
692   Index

Islamic extremism 195 jus in bello (JIB) 215, 222–3, 224, 225, 226–7,
Islamic State (IS/​ISIS) 236, 262, 371 228–9, 230, 248–9, 669
Islamophobia 353 justice
is/​ought statements 52, 222, 604, 605 environmental justice and
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 236 sustainability 179–90
Issacharoff, I. 238 global distributive justice 103–16, 666, 670
transitional justice 153–63
justificatory respect 121, 126
JAB (see jus ad bellum) just war theory (JWT) 3, 55, 221–31, 248–9,
Jackson Preece, J. 169, 176n4 666, 669
Jackson, P. T. 597 just conduct in war 225–7
Jacobs, M. 180, 183, 185, 186 ‘just,’ definition of 209–12
Jahn, B. 24 just resort to war 223–5
James, A. 107, 108, 416, 509–11, 512 just war tradition 209–18
Janis, I. L. 443 outline of 221–3
Jardine, M. 238–9 in real world 227–31
Jefferson, T. 432 responsibility, concept of 253–5
Jeffery, R. 22, 23, 214 revisionism 223–5, 226–30, 231,
Jeffreys, S. 92–3 670–1, 672–3
Jensen, B. 263, 264 ‘tradition,’ definition of 214–17
Jervis, R. 583 ‘war,’ definition of 212–14
JIB (see jus in bello)
Joas, H. 409
job insecurity 122 Kaempf, S. 242
Joerges, C. 444 Kagan, S. 492n3
Johannesburg Declaration, World Summit on Kahn, P. 255–6
Sustainable Development 473–4 Kaldor, M. 317, 321
Johns, F. 62 Kalyvas, S. N. 239
Johnson, J. 402 Kamradt-​Scott, A. 362
Johnson, J. T. 210, 212, 215 Kanbur, R. 486
Johnson, S. 112 Kanie, N. 475
Jones, R. E. 55 Kant, I. 49–50, 56, 63, 575, 587–8
Jordan, A. 181 emotions 601, 606
Jörke, D. 446 political emancipation 75–6
Josling, T. E. 445 Urteilskraft (art of judgement) 576–8
Joyce, R. 604 Kaplan, M. 52
Judah, T. 239 Kapur, R. 350, 351
judgement 575–85 Kapur, S. 275
(in)formality of 576–8 Karp, D. J. 132, 293
and politics 581–5 Karpowitz, C. F. 443
practical problems 579–81 Kates, R. W. 473
Jung, C. 348 Katz, J. 87
Junger, S. 255 Kaufman, W. 217
jus ad bellum (JAB) 215, 222, 225, 227, Keal, P. 499
228–9, 248 Keck, M. E. 230
jus ante bellum 249 Kedar, A. 605
jus cogens 146–7, 387–8 Keene, E. 22, 25, 27
 Index   693

Keller, A. 614, 618–19 Krever, T. 67

Kello, L. 260, 264 Krisch, N. 62, 405, 456
Kelsay, J. 201, 216 Kroll, L. 472
Kelsen, H. 60, 306 Krüger, A. K. 159
Kennan, G. 10, 51, 495, 497 Kukathas, C. 350, 354n2
Kennedy, D. 64, 65, 66, 68, 147, 306 Kuosmanen, J. 150
Kent, S. A. 345 Kupperman, J. 589, 590
Kenya 348 Kurjanska, M. 511–12
Keohane, R. O. 37, 44, 54, 157, 455 Kurzweil, R. 252
climate equity 537–8 Kymlica, W. 39
global democracy 418, 422 Kymlicka, W. 344
political legitimacy 400, 401, 408 Kyoto Protocol 533, 534, 535, 537, 539, 542
Keys, B. J. 304
Khadduri, M. 201–2
Khader, S. 566–7 Laborde, C. 627, 629, 632, 633, 635
Kiehl, K. 606 labour market liberalization 124
King-​Hall, S. 284 Laclau, E. 158, 435
King, M. L., Jr. 275–6, 279 Lafont, C. 82, 374
Kingsbury, B. 148, 150, 457 Laitinen, A. 612
Kinsella, H. 215 Lakey, G. 276
Kissinger, H. 501 Lakoff, A. 362
Klabbers, J. 64 Lambourne, W. 158
Kleine, M. 446 land degradation 179
Klein, N. 304, 594 land use change 474
Klick, J. 516n3 Lane, M. 487
Knake, R. K. 265–6 Lang, A.F. Jr 24, 45, 63, 659, 662n1
Knight, J. 402 Langø, H.-​I. 263
Knobe, J. 605 Laqueur, T. 291
Knop, K. 61 Larson, F. 195
Knorr, K. 498 Laslett, P. 25
Knutsen, T. 22 Lasswell, H. 60
Kocher, M. 239 Latour, B. 250, 436
Koenig-​Archibugi, M. 400, 457, 459 Lauren, P. 292
Koenigs, M. 603 Lauterpacht, H. 64
Kohlberg, L. 560–1 law
Kohler-​ Koch, B. 448 authority of 198–9
Kolb, R. 215 violence and 204–5
Kolers, A. 171–2 Lawford-​Smith, H. 9, 415, 642, 643, 665, 667
Koller, D. 149 Law, J. 250
Koplow, D. A. 241 Lawler, P. 501
Korteweg, A. 353 law of armed conflict (LOAC) 233, 234
Koselleck, R. 25–6 Law of Nations or Principles of International
Koskenniemi, M. 62, 63, 65, 68, 143 Law, The (Vattel) 49
Kosovo crisis 136–7, 238, 239, 244, 300, Lawrence, B. 173
309, 324 Lawrence, W. W. 256
Kouvo, S. 146 Lawson, G. 61–2
Kramer, M. H. 593 Lawson, S. 262–3
694   Index

Lazar, S. 222, 223, 228–9, 670, 672 Livingston, D. 576, 578

LDK (Democratic League of Kosovo) 239 Lloyd, G. E. R. 216
League of Nations 49 LOAC (see law of armed conflict)
Lebow, R. N. 24, 583, 614–15 Long, D. 50
Lee, A. 514 Long, S. 371
Leebaw, B. 296 Long, W. J. 600
legal frameworks 268 Lorimer, J. 61, 64
legalism 156–8 Louden, R. B. 588
legal positivism 62–3 Louis XVI, King of France 195
Legnano, G. da 213–14 Love, J. B. 239
Leiserowitz, A. A. 473 Luban, D. 39, 55, 223–4, 225
Lener, M. 448 Lucas, J. R. 131
Leon-​Portilla, M. 26 luck 131
Leviathan (Hobbes) 25, 28 circumstantial luck 133–5, 140
Levin, T. 350 constitutive luck 137–9, 140
Lewis, J. A. 262 resultant luck 135–7, 140
Lewontin, R. 249 role of 133–9
LGBTQ rights 370–80 Lui, D. 510
critical theoretical approach 373–4 Lund Recommendations on Effective
gay rights as human rights 374–9 Participation of National
global sexuality politics 372 Minorities 170, 171
homocapitalism 378–9 Luskin, R. C. 441
homocolonialism 377–8 Lyon, S. 515
homonationalism 376–7
homonormativity 375–6
as human rights 370–2 McCarthy, T. 82, 666
liberal cosmopolitanism 648–9 McCarty, R. 601
liberal democracy 431–2 McDermott, P. 351
liberal feminism 344–5, 350–2 MacDonald, K. 405, 406, 408
liberal hegemony 615–17 MacDonald, T. 416, 418
liberal institutionalism 54 McDougal, M. 60
liberal internationalism 648 McEvoy, K. 157, 161
liberalism 431–3, 520, 630 McGee, R. 459
liberalism of fear 647–50 McGeer, V. 607
liberal multiculturalism 344–5, 347–50 Mac Ginty, R. 161
Libicki, M. C. 264 McGregor, L. 161
libido dominandi doctrine 211 Machiavelli, N. 22, 23, 27–8, 50
Libya 333 MacIntyre, A. C. 176n1, 604, 627
Liddell Hart, B. 280 Mackintosh, J. 22
Lie, J. 87 Macklem, P. 175
Lind, A. 372 McInnes, C. 362
Lindemann, T. 614, 615 McMahan, J. 196, 209, 226, 227, 666, 669–70,
Lindsay, J. R. 260, 262, 264, 266 671, 672
Linklater, A. 24, 37, 40–1, 56, 68, 76, 203, 291, McMahon, P. 515
499, 662n3 Magone, C. 298
List, C. 132, 400, 416, 665, 667 Malcolm, N. 23, 30
Lister, M. 525, 526–7 male prostitution 87, 89, 90–3, 95–7
 Index   695

Mali 334, 555–6 Medda-​Windischer, R. 176n3

Malloch-​Brown, M. 549 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors
Maltais, A. 540 without Borders) 295, 300, 323–4, 569
Mandaville, P. 202 media warfare 242–3
Manin, B. 441 Mégret, F. 149
Mani, R. 158 Meier, B. 161
Manning, W. 27 Meier, P. 353
Mansbridge, J. 443 Meinecke, F. 23, 50
Maoz, Z. 266 Meisels, T. 240–1
Mapel, D. 496 Mellinger, A. 111–12
Mapping Militant Organizations 238–9 Mellor, M. 180
Marchetti, R. 388, 390, 670 membership-​dependent
Marco, C. 514 cosmopolitanism 120–2, 126
Marcuse, H. 75 Mercer, J. 600, 602, 603
Markell, P. 621–2 Merry, S. E. 310
Markoff, J. 248 methodological pluralism 30
Marks, S. 304 Meyer, J. 170
Marshall, S. 459 MHC (Meaningful Human Control) 251
Marsh Commission (1997) 267 Michelet, J. 216
Martel, F. 372 Midgley, M. 256
Martí, J. L. 631 Mieth, F. 157, 161
Martin, B. 280 migration 176n3, 520–31, 565–6
Marxism climate migrants 470
capital and class 655–6 intimates 525–7
critique of IPT 652–62, 659–61 motivational/​institutional
international political space 653–5 constraints 529–30
in IR 657–9 refugees 77, 521–2, 523–5
Marx, K. 56, 75–6, 118, 649, 655, 656, rights of migrants 77
662nn2&5 skill-​based 527–8
critique of capitalism 659–61 state duties 522–9
mass atrocities 300, 330–9 trends in 521–2
mass poverty 548, 552, 553, 555 vulnerable populations 527–9
Masullo Jiménez, J. 280–1 Mikdashi, M. 377
Mathews, F. 436 Milanovič, B. 123, 124
Mato Oput, Uganda 155 Miles, K. 65
Matthias, A. 254 Milford, A. 514
Maurer, P. 289 military pacifism 222
May, L. 216, 222 military prostitution 87, 89, 90–3, 95–7
Maynor, J. 627, 629 Millennium Development Goals
Mazower, M. 61 (MDGs) 549, 555, 596
McPherson, C. B. 431 Miller, C. 618
MDGs (Millennium Development Miller, D. 104, 126, 138, 388, 453–4, 517n5, 520,
Goals) 549, 555, 596 524, 629, 666, 670
Meaningful Human Control (MHC) 251 duty of assistance (DA) 490–1
Mearsheimer, J. 10, 51, 54 fair trade 508, 512, 514
meat consumption 469 nation-​states 173, 174
Meckled-​Garcia, S. 488, 671 political legitimacy 400, 411
696   Index

Miller-​Dawkins, M. 456, 459, 460 Movimento Sanitário, Brazil 366

Mill, J. S. 66 Moyn, S. 55, 61, 78, 154, 292, 304, 311
Mills, C. W, 24, 666 MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors
Mills, K. 204 without Borders) 295, 300, 323–4, 569
Milošević, S. 277 Muchembled, R. 203, 206
minority rights 166–75, 348–9, 352 Muldoon, J. 25
importance of 175 Müller, H. 446
within IPT 171–4 multiculturalism 343–54, 551
minority problems to minority deliberative democracy 345–6
rights 168–70 liberal feminism 344–5, 350–2
minority question in IR 167–8 liberal multiculturalism 344–5, 347–50
misrecognition 364, 365–6, 614, 621 policy conflicts 352–3
Mitzen, J. 445–6 and postcolonial feminism 347–52
mobilization 311 and procedural democracy 350–2
Moellendorf, D. 484 and substantive democracy 347–50
Mohanty, C. T. 351 Munster, Treaty of 67
Mohawk Nation 349 Murphy, A. B. 27
Moisi, D. 600 Murphy, L. 490
Mokyr, J. 112 Murray, D. 514, 515
Möller, N. 415, 417, 419–20 Muslim culture 345–6
Montague, P. 589 Mussolini, B. 22
Montefiore, S. S. 23 mutual benefit
Montgomery bus boycott 275 aid and 552–7
Montreal Declaration 371 aid for mitigation of climate change 556–7
Montreal Protocol 535–6 aid to fragile states 555–6
MONUSCO (UN Mission in the Democratic Chinese infrastructure-​for-​resource
Republic of the Congo) 322 deals 553–4
Moon, K. 89, 91 subsidies for commercial investment
Moore, D. 267 554–5
Moore, G. E. 256, 588, 604 Mutua, M. W. 375
moral accessibility 41–2
moral agents 132
moral cosmopolitanism 520, 563 Nagel, T. 57, 119, 120, 176n1
moral egalitarianism 38 circumstantial luck 133–5
moral particularism 39 distributive justice 104, 105
moral responsibility 130–40 resultant luck 135–6
judgements of 131–2 An-​Nahda party, Tunisia 282–3
Moravcsik, A. 68, 267 Nanwani, S. 456
Mor, B. D. 242 Nanz, P. 445, 447
Moreno, J. 249 Narayan, U. 350, 351, 565
Morgan, J. 540 Nardin, T. 3, 49, 50, 55, 214, 215, 496
Morgenthau, H. J. 10, 50–2, 504, 646 Narlikar, A. 455, 457
Morris, J. 335 nationally determined contributions
Morseletto, P. 475 (NDCs) 534, 535
Mörth, U. 417 National Movement for the Defense of the
Morton, A. D. 662n7 Right to Health, Paraguay 366
Mouffe, C. 80, 435, 649 National Rifle Association 310
 Index   697

nation-​states Nunes, J. 361

and minorities 167–9, 171, 173–4 Nunn, N. 515
and sovereignty 79, 84 Nuremberg trials 149, 156, 496
natural capital 183–5, 186, 188–9 Nussbaum, M. C. 308, 344, 351, 587–8, 596
natural law 198 Nye, J. S. 261–2, 266
Naurin, D. 447, 448 Nystrom, L. E. 603
NDCs (nationally determined
contributions) 534, 535
Negri, A. 81–2 Oakeshott, M. 22, 23, 26, 28
Neier, A. 311 Oakley, J. 588
Nelkin, D. K. 133 OAU (see Organization of African Unity)
Nel, P. 616, 621 Obama, B. 217, 268
neo-​positivism 11 Oberman, K. 520, 528–9
Neuman, M. 298 O’Brien, G. 180
Neumann, I. 617 O’Brien, R. 455
neuroscience 602–5 O’Callaghan, S. 324
neutrality 295–6, 318 ocean acidification 474
Nevins, J. 238–9 OCHA (see Office for the Coordination of
new (constructivist) Humanitarian Affairs)
communitarianism 39–40, 42–3 O’Donnell, G. 437
Newell, P. 459 O’Driscoll, C. 196, 223, 268
new international economic order (NIEO) OECD (see Organisation for Economic
movement 145–6 Co-​operation and Development)
new realism 8–10 offensive realism 54
New York Times 323 Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Neyer, J. 444 Affairs (OCHA) 319
Ngcwangu, S. 514 Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Nicaragua v. United States (1986) 66 Rights (OHCHR) 319
Nichols, S. 605 Ohlin, J. D. 222
Niebuhr, R. 10, 51 Okin, S. M. 344, 346, 350
NIEO (new international economic order) Olsen, J. P. 459
movement 145–6 O’Neill, J. 181, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189–90
Nissenbaum, H. 262 O’Neill, O. 132, 416, 419, 601, 606, 665
nitrogen cycle 182, 474 O’Neill, S. 613
Non-​Aligned Movement 326 Onuf, N. G. 24, 615, 621, 626, 630, 633, 635
non-​ideal theory 4, 9, 665 Orford, A. 66, 204, 320
non-​intervention 3 Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and
non-​lethal weapons 241 Development (OECD) 457, 521, 522, 557
nonviolent action 273–84 Organization for Security and Co-​operation
civil resistance 273, 274–81 in Europe (OSCE) 170, 171
power politics and nonviolent Organization of African Unity (OAU) 395
struggle 277–80 Organization of American States 170, 171
satyagraha 274, 275 Orlando, V. 67
nonviolent disintegration 277 O’Rourke, C. 159
normative inquiry 10–11 OSCE (see Organization for Security and
normative theory 4, 5–8, 10, 51–4 Co-​operation in Europe)
Nouwen, S. 149–50 Osiander, A. 22
698   Index

Otto, D. 65 Pedersen, S. 69
‘ought implies can’ principle 107, 580, 671, 673 Pelikan, J. 215
output legitimacy 402–3 Peloponnesian Wars (Thucydides) 247
Øverland, G. E. 492n3, 528–9 People’s Health Movement 366
Overseas Development Institute 292 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
Owens, P. 197 (Kant) 49
Oxfam 119, 323 Perritt, H. H. 238–9
ozone layer depletion 185 Peskowitz, A. 242
Peterson, V. S. 88, 90, 94
Peterson, W. 344
pacifism 201, 221–2, 230, 273 Pettit, P. 132, 410, 631
Paddon, E. 320, 321, 322 republicanism 626–8, 629, 630, 632, 633–5
Pagden, A. 25 Pettman, J. J. 88
Pahuja, S. 63, 69 Pettys, T. E. 601
Palestinian Liberation Organization Pevnick, R. 531n1
(PLO) 618–19 PGMs (precision-​guided munitions) 238
Pandolfi, M. 316–17 Pham, P. 157
Panetta, L. 248–9 Philadelphian system 631
Pangle, T. L. 22, 24 Phillips, A. 354nn1&2
Panitch, L. 658 Phillips Curve 52
Pantuliano, S. 324 Philp, M. 409
Papadopoulos, Y. 406 Phoenix Program, Vietnam War 239
Pape, R. A. 261 phosphorous cycle 474
Parekh, B. C. 345, 347 phronesis 24, 576
Paris Agreement, United Nations Framework Picq, M. 90
Convention on Climate Change Pictet, J. 295, 318
(COP-21) 472, 475, 534–5, 539–40, 542 Piewitt, M. 447
Paris, R. 336 Piketty, T. 119, 125, 311
Parker, J. 65 Pinker, S. 202–3
Parkinson, F. 22 pinkwashing 310, 377
Park, S. 456 Pinto, C. J. 238–9
Parks, B. C. 540 Plastina, A. 514
Parris, T. M. 473 Plato 28, 60–1, 212–13, 583
participatory liability 238–41 PLO (see Palestinian Liberation Organization)
Pasek, J. 181–2, 184 Pocock, J. G. A. 25, 216
Pateman, C. 24, 351, 435 Pogge, T. 38, 43, 118, 119, 132, 516n2, 643, 666,
Pateman, R. 238–9 667, 669, 670
paternalism 308, 310, 332, 565, 566–7 distributive justice 103, 104, 105, 111
Paternotte, D. 373 duty of assistance (DA) 484, 485, 488
patriotism 629 global resources dividend (GRD) 642, 644
Pattberg, P. 475, 538 health issues 360, 366
peacekeeping 319, 320–2, 325 public policy 481–92
Peace of Westphalia 27 duty of assistance and 486–9, 492
Peach, L. J. 94 Fair Trade and 508–16
Pearce, D. 184, 190n1 IPT norms and 481–3
Pearl, Daniel 195 Law of Peoples and 483–4
Pearson, Z. 146 political feasibility 112–13
 Index   699

political legitimacy Puar, J. 377

choice-​making process 401–4 public diplomacy 242–3
governance capability and 401–7 public policy 481–2
new research agenda 407–10 public policy networks 456–7
political moralism 9 public processions 273
political realism 8–10, 278–9 Pufendorf, S. von 21, 22, 49, 215–16
Pollock, F. 75 Putin, V. 372, 617
polluter pays principle 138
Pomeranz, K. 112
Porter, T. 405, 455 Questions on the Heptateuch (Augustine of
positive theory 10, 11 Hippo) 210
positivist law 198 Qureshi, A.H. 510
Posner, D. N. 348
Posner, E. A. 305, 534, 537, 541
postcolonial feminism 347–52 R2P (responsibility to protect) doctrine,
postcolonial intersectionality 349, 352–3 see responsibility to protect (R2P)
Postero, N. G. 349 doctrine
post-​human democracy 436–7 Radcliffe, S. A. 349, 352–3
Postone, M. 661 radical democracy 435
post-​structuralism 3–4 Raghuram, P. 560, 570
Pouliot, V. 293, 294 Rahman, A. 350
poverty 105, 111, 119–20, 642 Rahman, M. 378
health and 363–6 Räikkä, J. 665
mass poverty 548, 552, 553, 555 Rajan, R. 487
power, balance of 49, 50, 52, 53–4 Ralph, J. G. 67
practice-​based normative theory Randle, M. 281
Fair Trade and 509–13 Rao, R. 309, 372, 378–9
global political legitimacy and 408–10 Raphael, C. 443
praxeology 37, 41, 43 rational choice theory 52
precision-​guided munitions (PGMs) 238 rational cosmopolitanism 601–2, 606
Predelli, L. N. 351 Ratner, S. 147
Price, M. 525 Ravallion, M. 471–2
Price, R. 11, 12, 40, 42, 43 RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the
Princen, T. 476–7 Women of Afghanistan) 351
Prince, The (Machiavelli) 28, 50 Rawls, J. 9, 11, 24, 37–8, 55, 120, 316, 403, 516n2,
Prinz, J. J. 605 595, 596, 665, 666, 670
problem-​solving theory 7–8 democracy 345, 417, 420, 421
procedural democracy 346, 350–2 duty of assistance (DA) 483–4, 485–6, 488,
proportionality 237, 268, 296–7 489, 490, 491
Proposed American Declaration on the Rights human rights 306, 308, 525
of Indigenous Peoples 170, 171 justice 54, 103, 104, 667, 668–9
prospective moral responsibility 131–2 law of peoples 483–4, 485, 491, 668
prostitution modern international law 63, 64
female 91 society of peoples 483–4, 485
male 87, 89, 90–3, 95–7 Raynolds, L. 514
psychology 602 Razack, S. 347
psychopathic behaviour 606–7 Raz, J. 196, 307, 308
700   Index

realism 76, 221–2, 230, 641–50 responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine 82,
analytical realism 642–4 203–4, 243–4, 300, 304, 320, 330–40
feasibility challenge 641–4 alternatives to 337–8
liberal realism 647–50 challenges to 333–4
and moralism 644–5 and cosmopolitanism 331–3, 334
myth of amorality 644–5 efficacy of 334–8
myth of inherent conservativism 646–7 and humanitarian intervention 300, 330–1,
myth of state-​centrism 645–6 332, 333–4, 336
see also new realism ICISS report 568–9
see also political realism prioritization of goals 338–40
real-​world politics 4 and statism 331–3
IPT and 481–92 responsibility while protecting (RwP) 333
republicanism and 634–6 restorative justice 158–60, 162
reciprocity 106–7 restraint 264–5
recognition 365, 612–22 resultant luck 135–7, 140
literature on 613–15 retributive justice 156–8, 162–3
and misrecognition 621 retributive legalism 67
status recognition 615–20 retrospective moral responsibility 131–2
of terrorists 617–19 Reus-​Smit, C. 11, 40, 41, 43, 230, 306
of victims 619–20 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-​
Redfield, P. 293 People’s Army (FARC-​EP) 618–19
Refugee Convention, see United Nations Revolutionary Association of the Women of
(UN): Convention Relating to the Status Afghanistan (RAWA) 351
of Refugees Rhodes, R. A. W. 405
refugees 77, 521–2, 523–5 Richards, N. 136
regime change 55–6, 233, 236 Ricoeur, P. 622
Reichberg, G. M. 215 Rid, T. 262, 265, 266, 267
Reid, D. 183, 184 Rieff, D. 323
Reidy, D. A. 484, 491–2 Right to Health and Health Care Campaign,
Reiff, D. 563 India 366
Reinicke, W. H. 456–7 Ringdal, N. J. 87
Reinl, J. 371 Ringmar, E. 614, 617
Reisman, W. M. 60 Rio Declaration on Environment and
religion: and violence 200–2 Development 533
Rengger, N. J. 3, 24, 49, 50, 204 Risse-​Kappen, T. 583
Renner, J. 620 Risse, M. 36, 38, 103, 488, 511–12
rent refusal 273 Risse, T. 309, 444, 446, 529
reparation and impunity principles 619 Roberts, A. 27, 277
republican cosmopolitanism 78 Roberts, J. T. 540, 541
republicanism 626–37 Robinson, F. 95
core features of 627–30 Robinson, J. 112
and IR 630–4 Robins, R. 150
and real-​world politics 634–6 robots 251–4, 256
Republic, The (Plato) 28 Rockström, J. 179, 184, 185, 187, 474
Requerimiento, Council of Castile 24 Rodan, G. 460, 462
responsibility 253–5 Rodin, D. 224
moral responsibility 130–40 Rodriguez-​Garavito, B. 78, 84
 Index   701

Rodrik, D. 112 Salter, M. 160

Rogers, P. 243 samizdat publications 278
Romania 167, 348 San-​Akca, B. 266
Ronchi, L. 514 Sandel, M. 176n1, 553, 627
Ronfeldt, D. 259 Sanders, L. M. 443
Ronzoni, M. 107, 108, 409, 416, 629, 635 Sands, P. 67
Roosevelt, F. D. 23 Sangari, K. 351
rooted cosmopolitanism 173 Sanghera, G. 161
Ropp, S. C. 529 Sangiovanni, A. 105, 106–10, 120, 409, 416,
Rorty, R. 255, 257 517n5, 667
Rosen, A. M. 537 Saouli, A. 203
Rosenau, J. N. 498 Sartori, M. 61
Rosenberg, J. 662 Sartre, J.-​P. 621
Rosen, S. P. 600 Sayer, D. 659
Ross, A. A. G. 600 Scanlon, T. M. 55, 491
Rossi, E. 9, 126, 505, 641, 645 Schacht, J. 201
Roth, K. 311 Scharpf, F. W. 402, 403, 411n3
Rottmann, S. B. 351 Scheffler, S. 672
Routley, R. 188 Scheinin, M. 304
Routley, V. 188 Scheipers, S. 212
Ruan Zongze 333 Schelling, T. 52
Ruben, R. 514, 515 Scheuerman, W. 79, 420, 646, 649
Rubenstein, J. 457 Schick, K. 613
Rudder, C. 455 Schlosberg, D. 189
Ruddick, S. 560 Schmidt, B. 49
Rueschemeyer, J. D. 431 Schmitt, C. 24, 29, 65, 67, 68, 80–1
rules 204–5 Schmitt, M. 268
Runciman, D. 645, 646 Schmitz, H. P. 292
Runyan, A. S. 88 Schneewind, J. B. 588
Rural Women’s Movement, South Africa 352 Scholte, J. A. 388, 416, 420–1, 423–4, 445, 455, 459
Rushton, S. 362 Schouten, P. 24
Russell, A. L. 264 Scott, S. 68
Russett, B. 583 SDGs (specific sustainable development
Russo, A. 351 goals) 179
Rwanda 136, 139, 320–1, 330–1 sea-​level rise 470
International Criminal Tribunal for Sebenius, J. K. 115
Rwanda 149 secession 38–9
Gacaca tribunals 155, 160 Seckinelgin, H. 373
RwP (responsibility while protecting) 333 Second Lebanon War (2006) 239
self-​defence 63, 198, 214, 217, 223–4, 227–8
self-​determination 27, 76, 82–3, 167, 243
Sabaratnam, M. 161 Arab Spring 203, 233, 282–4
Sabel, C. 408, 444 asymmetric conflict and 233, 235–6, 237
Sachs, J. 111–12 humanitarian actors and 324–5
Sadat, L. N. 304 indigenous peoples and 175
Salter, J. 255 international law and 64, 66
Salter, J. A. 444 just war theory and 223, 224
702   Index

Sen, A. 121, 363, 419, 512, 593–6, 608, 666 Smith, T. 428
Severs, E. 353 Smoke, R. 265
sexual orientation 310–11: see also Snead, O. C. (2007) 605
LGBTQ rights Snidal, D. 11
Shachar, A. 347, 354n2 Snyder, J. 12, 156, 169
Shacknove, A. E. 523 social accountability 459
Shapcott, R. 299 social contract 63, 146, 199, 223–4
Shapiro, I. 143 social democracy 434–5
Sharma, N. 172 society: and violence 202–4
Sharp, G. 276–7, 280 soft war 241–3
Shaw, R. 161 SOGI (Independent Expert on Sexual
Shaybani, M. 201–2 Orientation and Gender Identity) 371
Sheley, J. 87 Sohn, L. B. 51
Shepherd, L. 90 solar radiation management 469
Sherman, N. 590 Solomon, D. 589
Shklar, J. 62, 67, 156, 647–8, 649 Solomon, R. C. 602
Shridharani, K. 276 Soltau, F. 541
Shue, H. 55, 118, 229, 669, 670, 671, 672 Sommerville, B. 603
health and poverty 359–60, 361 Song, S. 346, 347, 351
Sikkink, K. 153, 230, 292, 304, 317, 529 Sonmez, S. 87
Simmons, A. J. 411n1, 665 Sophocles 21
Simmons, B. 304 Sørensen, E. 411n2
Simmons, B. A. 60 Souter, J. 524
Simpson, A. 349 sovereign equality 82
Simpson, G. 145 sovereignty 3, 27, 74, 76–84, 332, 404
Singer, J. D. 52 crisis of 79–81
Singer, P. 188, 487, 490, 498, 601, 670, 672 critiques of empire 81–3
Singer, P. W. 241 end of 76–9
Sinn Féin, Ireland 618–19 future of 83–4
situationism 251 and global political legitimacy 400–11
situationist experimental psychology 590 Hobbes 29–30
Sjoberg, L. 215 and republicanism 629–30
Skinner, Q. 25, 28–9, 626, 627, 629 Sparrow, R. 253–4
Skouteris, T. 63 species loss 179
Slaughter, A.-​M. 455–6, 457 specific sustainable development goals
Sleat, M. 8, 9, 126, 505, 641, 645 (SDGs) 179
Slim, H. 298, 317, 319 Spinello, R. 268
Slote, M. 589 Spinoza, Baruch 28
Smith, A. 607–8 Spivak, G. C. 372
Smith, D. 268 Sriram, C. 158
Smith, G. 189 Stammers, N. 373
Smith, K. 635 Standing, G. 122
Smith, L. 366 statism 173, 331–4, 336
Smith, M. 498, 606 Statman, D. 133, 256
Smith, N. H. 613 Steans, J. 88–9
Smith, R. 212 Stears, M. 11–12, 126, 464
Smith, S. 41, 497 Stefan, W. 179, 180, 182, 184, 185
 Index   703

Steffek, J. 403, 408, 423–4 TAC (Treatment Action Campaign), South

Steinhoff, U. 209 Africa 366
Stein, J. G. 583 Taliban, Afghanistan 618–19
Stemplowska, Z. 665 Tallberg, J. 419, 447
Stephan, M. J. 239, 282 Tallgren, I. 67, 149
Stevenson, H. 397 Tallinn Manual 268
Stiglitz, J. 311, 594 Tang, S. 600
Stoermer, E. 467 Tan, K.-​C. 120, 484, 497
Stoeva, P. 362 targeted killing 239
Strachan, H. 212 Tasioulas, J. 63, 64, 485, 492n1
stratospheric ozone depletion 185, 468, tax systems 551–2
471, 474 Taylor, C. 408–9, 461, 462, 612, 613, 614
Strauss, L. 23 Taylor, P. 188, 514
Streck, C. 537 Taylor, T. 249
Streeck, W. 83 Teitel, R. G. 63, 156, 157, 289, 317, 326
strikes 273 Terra, L. 170
Strömbom, L. 614 terrestrial cosmopolitanism 171–3
Strong, T. 575–6 terrorism 80, 233, 235–6
structural realism 53, 54 bioterrorism 361
Stuxnet worm 260, 262 9/​11 attacks 74, 205, 309
Suarez, F. 61 Paris attacks (November 2015) 309
Subramanian, A. 112, 487 Terry, F. 323
subsidiarity 395 Teschke, B. 662&n4
substantive democracy 345–6, 347–50 Teson, F. 516n3
Suganami, H. 24 Tetlock, P. 579, 584, 585
Sundberg, M. 487 Teubner, G. 78–9
Sunder, M. 350 Thévenot, L. 409
Sunstein, C. 443 Thiel, M. 90
Sun Tzu 27 Thomas, D. C. 502
sustainable development 179–90 Thompson, A. 408
capital and 183–4 Thompson, D. F. 443
concept of 180–3 Thompson, J. 40–1, 138
definition of 180, 181 Thomson, J. J. 603
distributive goal of 182–3 Thoreson, R. R. 372, 373
limited substitutability 186 Three Laws of Robotics (Asimov) 252–3
metric of 181–2 Thucydides 26, 247
objections to 187–90 Thun, C. 351
strong sustainability 185, 186–7, 188 Thurer, D. 318
unjustified anthropocentrism 188 Tickner, J. A. 88, 91
weak/​strong conceptions of 183–7 Ticktin, M. 290, 565–6
weak sustainability 184–5, 188 Tikk, E. 267
Suzuki, E. 456 Tilton, T. 434
Swanton, C. 589, 591, 592 Tobin, J. 124–5
Swift, A. 419, 665 Tobin Tax (Financial Transaction Tax) 124–5
Sylvester, C. 88, 95 Tokyo tribunals 149, 156
Symons, J. 371, 372 Tolstoy, L. 274
Syse, H. 215 Top Gun (film) 255
704   Index

Torfing, J. 411n2 UN Charter 144, 204–5, 319–20, 501

Toros, H. 618 UN Commission on Human Rights 619
Torres, L. 351 UN Conference on Sustainable Development
Totten, M. 217 (2012) 476
Toubia, N, 350 UN Convention on the Prevention
Tractatus de Bello, de Represaliis et de Duello and Punishment of the Crime of
(Giovanni da Legnano) 213 Genocide 501
trade law 38–9 UN Convention Relating to the Status of
Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Refugees 522, 523, 525
Rights (TRIPS) 366, 509–13 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
tradition: definition of 214–17 People 170, 171, 175, 176n6
traditional justice 160–1, 162 UN Declaration on the Rights of
transcendental institutionalism 121 Persons Belonging to National
transitional justice 153–63 or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic
history of 154–5 Minorities 170, 171
restorative justice 158–60, 162 UNDP (see United Nations Development
retributive justice 156–8, 162–3 Programme)
traditional justice 160–1, 162 UN Economic and Social Council
transnational accountability 458, 459–60, (ECOSOC) 396
461–2, 463 UNEP (United Nations Environment
transnational corporate accountability 459 Programme) 467
transnational democracy 388–94, 445 UNESCO 170, 171
transnationalism 406 UNFCCC, see United Nations Framework
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), South Convention on Climate Change
Africa 366 UN General Assembly 145–6, 619
Trebbi, F. 112 UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGEs) 261
Trejo-​Mathys, J. 410 UNHCHR (see United Nations High
Triadafilopoulos, T. 353 Commissioner for Human Rights)
Trianosky, G. 588, 590 UNHCR (see United Nations High
TRIPS (see Trade-​Related Aspects of Commissioner for Refugees)
Intellectual Property Rights) UNHRC (see United Nations Human Rights
Tronto, J. C. 562, 564, 565, 566, 567 Council)
Truong, T.-​D. 564, 569 UN Human Development Report (2004) 170
truth commissions 158–9, 162 UN Human Rights Due Diligence Policy 326
Tsáchila women, Ecuador 349 UN Human Rights Up Front initiative 326
Tsing, A. L. 461 United Nations (UN) 319–23, 325–7
Tuck, R. 25, 68 appropriateness of, in Anthropocene 472–3
Tully, J. 25, 632–3, 635 LGBT rights 371
Turiano, L. 366 migration figures 521–2
mission settings 320–2
non-​mission settings 322–3
UDHR (see Universal Declaration of Human One Humanity report 569
Rights) robust peacekeeping 320–2
Ulas, L. 420 and war 66
UNCESCR (see United Nations Committee United Nations Committee on Economic,
on Economic, Social and Cultural Social and Cultural Rights
Rights) 3 (UNCESCR) 360
 Index   705

United Nations Development Programme US Department of the Navy 240

(UNDP) 159, 170, 357, 472 US State Department 429
United Nations Environment Programme utilitarianism 587–92, 597
(UNEP) 467 utopianism 40, 50, 78, 278–9, 410, 484, 649–50
United Nations Framework Convention Utting, P. 459
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 533,
535–40, 541–3
COP-​16: 535 Valentini, L. 105, 120, 123, 408, 416, 488
COP-​19: 539 global democracy 418, 419, 421
COP-​20: 539 Valkila, J. 515
COP-​21 (Paris Agreement) 472, 475, 534–5, Value Added Tax (VAT) 551
539–40, 542 van Boven, T. 619
equity commitments 537–8 van der Hel, S. 471
equity ideals 538–40 van der Linden, H. 249
United Nations High Commissioner for Van Der Stoep, J. 462
Human Rights (UNHCHR) 304, 359, 371 Van Evera, S. 54
United Nations High Commissioner for van Zyl, L. 591, 592
Refugees (UNHCR) 521, 530 Varaki, M. 64
United Nations Human Rights Council Vashdi, D. R. 241
(UNHRC) 240, 359, 371 Vasquez, J. A. 265
United Nations Millennium Development VAT (Value Added Tax) 551
Goals 549, 555, 596 Vattel, E. de 22, 49, 63, 215–16
United Nations Operation in Somalia Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia 278
(UNOSOM) 320 velvet revolutions 278, 282
United Nations Organization for Migration Verdirame, G. 318
(UNOM) 530–1 Verweij, M. 445
United Nations Security Council Victor, D. G. 537–8
(UNSC) 204, 371, 372, 387 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1969) 146
(UDHR) 43, 292, 358, 501 Vienna World Conference on Human
Universal Declaration on Cultural Rights 304
Diversity 170, 171 Vietnam War: Phoenix Program 239
UN Millennium Declaration 145 vigils 273
UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Vincent, R. J. 500
the Congo (MONUSCO) 322 Vinck, P. 157
UNMOVIC 205 Vinjamuri, L. 12, 156, 161
UNOM (United Nations Organization for violence 195–206, 279
Migration) 530–1 and authority 196–200
UNOSOM (United Nations Operation in biblical references to 200–1
Somalia) 320 and colonialism 197
UNSC (United Nations Security decrease in 202–3
Council) 204, 371, 372, 387 law and 204–5
UN Sustainable Development Council 476 regulation and governance of 200–5
UN Tribunal on the Law of the Sea 148 and religion 200–2
Upton, C. L. 590 society and 202–4
USAID 549 against women 146
US Department of Defence 251–2 see also just war theory (JWT)
706   Index

Viroli, M. 627, 629 Weber, C. 76, 90, 374, 515–16

virtue ethics 587–94, 597 Weber, J. 515
Vitoria, F. de 49, 61, 63 Weber, M. 645
Volpp, L. 347, 350, 351 Weigel, G. 215
Vreeland, J. R. 124 Weil, P. 63
Weisbach, D. 534, 537, 541
Weissman, F. 298
Wade, L. 350 Weiss, T. 295, 297
Waldorf, L. 161 Weiss, T. G. 405
Waldron, J. 290 Weldemichael, A. T. 239, 244
Waligore, T. 410 Wellman, C. H. 520, 526
Walker, M. U. 140, 559, 561 Welsh, J. 335
Walker, R. B. J. 22, 23, 24, 27, 28 Wenar, L. 484
Walker, W. 204 Wendt, A. 22, 267, 400, 604, 605, 614
Wallach, W. 251, 252 Westlake, J. 63
Wallerstein, I. 658, 662n6 Weston, B. 60
Walt, S. 51 Westphalian system 3, 22, 67, 74, 76, 144, 146,
Waltz, K. 10, 22, 53, 61, 498 631, 645
Walzer, M. 39, 55–6, 126, 217, 388 Wheeler, N. J. 66, 137, 500
ethical foreign policy 498–9 White, H. 515
just war theory 55, 209, 223–5, 226, 227, 669 Whitehead, A. 256
nation-​states 173, 174 White, S. 633
war crimes 149, 155, 236, 332, 619–20 White, S. K. 7
war crimes trials 66, 67 Whitman, R. 616
Ward, R. 68 WHO (World Health Organization), see
war on terror: post-​structural responses World Health Organization (WHO)
to 79–81 Wickens, E. 87
Warren, M. 406, 409 WIDE 119
Warrick, P. 253 Widerberg, O. 538
wars 66 Widmaier, W. 600
definition of 212–14 Wiens, D. 665, 666
human control 251–3 Wieringa, S. 564
human-​machine interface 249–51 Wight, M. 41, 50, 51, 60, 61–2, 504
individualization of 317–18 history of international thought 21,
of self-​defence 214 22, 23, 56
soft war 241–3 Wilkinson, C. 372
Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Wilkinson, I. 301
Damage 539 Wilkinson, R. 405
Waskow, D. 540 Willetts, P. 396
Wassenaar Agreement 261 Williams, B. 9, 126, 408, 409, 648
Wasserstrom, R. 223 moral luck 133, 137–8, 139, 140
Waters, M. 230 Williams, B. G. 261
Watt, M. W. 201 Williams, H. 22, 24
WCED (World Commission on Environment Williams, J. 196
and Development) 179, 180–1, 183, Williams, M. 455
188, 473 Williams, M. C. 28, 616
wealth inequality 119 Williams, M. S. 409
 Index   707

Williams, P. 321 World Environment Organization 476

Williams, R. 217 World Health Organization (WHO) 359,
Wilson, B. 514, 515 362, 529–30
Wilson, P. 50 health inequality 119, 357
Wilson, W. 428 World Human Rights Court 304
Winter, B. 87 World Social Forum 435
Wise, T. 514, 515 World Summit on Sustainable
Witte, J. M. 456–7 Development: Johannesburg
Wittgenstein, L. 577, 578 Declaration 473–4
Wohlforth, W. 495 world systems theory 658
Wolfensohn, J. 549 World Trade Organization (WTO) 82, 122,
Wolff, C. 22 124, 148, 447, 455
Wolff, R. 601 Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual
Wolf, R. 615, 616–17 Property Rights (TRIPS) 366, 509–13
Women’s Court, Sarajevo 622n3 Wroebel, M. G. 125
women’s rights 343–54
deliberative democracy 345–6
liberal feminism 344–5, 350–2 Xanthaki, A. 175
liberal multiculturalism 344–5 Xi Jingping 268
policy conflicts 352–3
postcolonial feminism 350–2
and procedural democracy 350–2 Yashar, D. J. 348
and substantive democracy 347–50 Yoder, J. H. 201
Wood, E. 662 Yogyakarta Principles 371
Woods, N. 455, 457 Young, I. M. 91, 94, 132, 143–4, 174, 402
World Bank 183, 455, 548 Young, L. 603
and global inequality 119, 123–4, 471 Young, M. 62, 64
and immigration 123–4 Yuval-​Davis, N. 349
and poverty 548–9
in Uganda 379
World Bank Group: International Finance Zartman, W. 618
Corporation 554 Zeitlin, J. 408
World Commission on Environment and Zerriffi, H. 514
Development (WCED) 179, 180–1, 183, Zizek, S. 80
188, 473 zoocentrism 188
world-​disclosing theory 7–8 Zürn, M. 456